the plain in its immediate vicinity is so thickly adorned with magnificent
structures of the purest marble, that it is not easy, nay it is impossible
at the distance at which I contemplated the whole, to distinguish the line
which divided the one from the other. It was all city and all country, all
country and all city. Those which lay before me I was ready to believe
were the Elysian Fields. I imagined that I saw under my feet the dwellings
of purified men and of gods. Certainly they were too glorious for the mere
earth-born. There was a central point, however, which chiefly fixed my
attention, where the vast Temple of the Sun stretched upward its thousand
columns of polished marble to the heavens, in its matchless beauty casting
into the shade every other work of art of which the world can boast. I
have stood before the Parthenon, and have almost worshipped that divine
achievement of the immortal Phidias. But it is a toy by the side of this
bright crown of the Eastern capital. I have been at Milan, at Ephesus, at
Alexandria, at Antioch; but in neither of those renowned cities have I
beheld any thing that I can allow to approach in united extent, grandeur,
and most consummate beauty, this almost more than work of man. On each
side of this, the central point, there rose upward slender
pyramids--pointed obelisks--domes of the most graceful proportions,
columns, arches and lofty towers, for number and for form, beyond my
power to describe. These buildings, as well as the walls of the city,
being all either of white marble, or of some stone as white, and being
every where in their whole extent interspersed, as I have already said,
with multitudes of overshadowing palm trees, perfectly filled and
satisfied my sense of beauty, and made me feel for the moment, as if in
such a scene I should love to dwell, and there end my days. Nor was I
alone in these transports of delight. All my fellow-travellers seemed
equally affected: and from the native Palmyrenes, of whom there were many
among us, the most impassioned and boastful exclamations broke forth.
'What is Rome to this?' they cried: 'Fortune is not constant. Why may not