To put it in very practical language, “Pharaoh’s Bed” was “all of a piece.”  The form was married to the color.  The color seemed to melt into the form.  It was indeed a bed in which the soul that worships beauty could rest happily entranced.  Nothing jarred.  Antiquaries say that apparently this building was left unfinished.  That may be so.  But for all that it was one of the most finished things in Egypt, essentially a thing to inspire within one the “perfect calm that is Greek.”  The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building to a hideous and dreary grey—­which made me think of a steel knife on which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run—­has destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and color.  And so it is with the temple.  It is, as it were, cut in two by the intrusion into it of this hideous, mottled complexion left by the receded water.  Everywhere one sees disease on the walls and columns, almost blotting out bas-reliefs, giving to their active figures a morbid, a sickly look.  The effect is specially distressing in the open court that precedes the temple dedicated to the Lady of Philae.  In this court, which is at the southern end of the island, the Nile at certain seasons is now forced to rise very nearly as high as the capitals of many of the columns.  The consequence of this is that here the disease seems making rapid strides.  One feels it is drawing near to the heart, and that the poor, doomed invalid may collapse at any moment.

Yes, there is much to make one sad at Philae.  But how much of pure beauty there is left—­of beauty that merely protests against any further outrage!

As there is something epic in the grandeur of the Lotus Hall at Karnak, so there is something lyrical in the soft charm of the Philae temple.  Certain things or places, certain things in certain places, always suggest to my mind certain people in whose genius I take delight—­who have won me, and moved me by their art.  Whenever I go to Philae, the name of Shelley comes to me.  I scarcely could tell why.  I have no special reason to connect Shelley with Philae.  But when I see that almost airy loveliness of stone, so simply elegant, so, somehow, spring-like in its pale-colored beauty, its happy, daffodil charm, with its touch of the Greek—­the sensitive hand from Attica stretched out over Nubia—­I always think of Shelley.  I think of Shelley the youth who dived down into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost for ever to the sun.  I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy, who was himself like an embodied

     “Longing for something afar
     From the sphere of our sorrow.”

Lyrical Philae is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley might have dreamed the dream and have told it to the world in a song.

For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt.  But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius.  Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man.  Shall we call it the spirit of Isis?