"
Such a cold and chilling speech would be a very good medicine for
uneasy vanity, but the best medicine of all is the contemplation of
the history of men who have flourished and loomed large before their
fellows, and who now have sunk into the night. How many mighty
warriors have made the earth tremble, filling the mouths of men with
words of fear or praise! They have passed away, and the only record of
their lives is a chance carving on a stone, a brief line written by
some curt historian. The glass of the years was brittle wherein they
gazed for a span; the glass is broken and all is gone. In the wastes
of Asia we find mighty ruins that even now are like symbols of
power--vast walls that impose on the imagination by their bulk,
enormous statues, temples that seem to mock at time and destruction.
The men who built those structures must have had supreme confidence in
themselves, they must have possessed incalculable resources, they must
have been masters of their world. Where are they now? What were their
names? They have sunk like a spent flame, and we have not even the
mark on a stone to tell us how they lived or loved or struggled. Far
in that moaning desert lie the remains of a city so great that even
the men who know the greatest of modern cities can hardly conceive the
original appearance and dimensions of the tremendous pile.
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