310 THE LESSON OF MUTABILITY. 



merly blooming with fertility, gay with gardens, and orchards, 

 and meadows, musical with brooks, and glorious with har- 

 vest, are now uncultivated and barren. Monuments which 

 seemed adapted to defy the winds and the rains, and the 

 corroding touch of the years, lie shattered in ruins ; and with 

 them the once populous cities and the once mighty empires of 

 which they were the pride. The jackal howls among the 

 broken columns of Tadmor ; the sand-drifts have accumulated 

 above the splendour of Memphis and Thebes. With their 

 stones other monuments are raised, other cities are embel- 

 lished, and other empires, which, in their turn, undergo the 

 same unalterable fate : a perpetual relation of human forms, 

 in every respect comparable with that which transpires in the 

 bosom of the prolific earth, our common mother and nurse. 



But why do men wander so far from the straight way ? Why 

 do they their best to ensure each other's unhappiness ? They 

 seem, alas ! ignorant of the tendency of their actions, while 

 attaching themselves to things transitory, and despising things 

 imperishable. These, indeed, they would utterly ignore j they 

 would live, like the brutes, unconscious of their destiny, if, at 

 the bottom of their indestructible conscience, there did not 

 prevail a glimmer of light, though more or less eclipsed, if 

 they did not all feel themselves attracted, if they did not all 

 irresistibly gravitate, some more quickly, others more slowly, 

 towards the sun of eternal truth and justice. Instead of 

 moving with sidelong sinuous pace, instead of taking ninety- 

 nine steps backward for every one hundred taken in advance, 

 they would all march onward in the way of progress ; were it 



