After years of waiting it was before me at last.  The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient.  There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore.  It was stone, but it seemed sentient.  If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking.  It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—­nothing but distance and vacancy.  It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past....  It was thinking of the wars of the departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow-revolving years . . . .

The Sphinx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story.  And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what we shall feel when we shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.

Then that closing word of Egypt.  He elaborated it for the book, and did not improve it.  Let us preserve here its original form.

We are glad to have seen Egypt.  We are glad to have seen that old land which taught Greece her letters—­and through Greece, Rome—­and through Rome, the world—­that venerable cradle of culture and refinement which could have humanized and civilized the Children of Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her borders savages—­those Children whom we still revere, still love, and whose sad shortcomings we still excuse—­not because they were savages, but because they were the chosen savages of God.

The Holy Land letters alone would have brought him fame.  They presented the most graphic and sympathetic picture of Syrian travel ever written —­one that will never become antiquated or obsolete so long as human nature remains unchanged.  From beginning to end the tale is rarely, reverently told.  Its closing paragraph has not been surpassed in the voluminous literature of that solemn land: 

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.  Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.  Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—­over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead—­about whose borders nothing grows but weeds and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch.  Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing one finds only a