Everything is mutable, everything is perishable around us. The forms of nature and the works of art alike crumble away; and amid the gigantic forms that surround it, the soul of man is alone immortal. Knowledge itself ebbs and flows like the changing sea, and art has become extinct in regions where it earliest flourished. Kingdoms that once gave law to the nations, figure no more in the world's history, leaving nothing but a name, and Ruins.

Most of the ruins of the ancient world are remarkable as monuments of a political element now happily extinct. They are emblems of that despotic rule which, in the early history of mankind, was well-nigh universal; which delighted in rearing immense structures, like the Pyramids, of little utility, but requiring an enormous expenditure of labour; and contrasted with the capriciousness and violence of which, the most arbitrary of modern governments is liberty itself. But such ruins not only teach us to be grateful to Heaven for the blessings of political freedom, but reveal to us glimpses of a past which, but for them, would remain veiled in obscurity. By a right use of them we discover, more or less perfectly, the history and the customs of races long dead. Buried Herculaneum, once more given back to the sunbeams, reveals to us the domestic life of ancient Rome; the hieroglyphics of Egypt, the paintings and sculptures of Nineveh, tell us stories of their kings, and show us symbols of their splendour. What geology is to us in relation to the early earth, such are ruins in regard to its human habitants: they are their history in stone.

There is a peculiar grandeur and impressiveness in the ruins which date from the era of the old universal monarchies. So many centuries have rolled away since then, conquest and desolation have so often swept over their territories, and tyranny so decimated their inhabitants, that among them Decay assumes a grander form than elsewhere in the world. It is not single edifices dilapidated that meet our view, but whole cities desolate—whole cities so crumbled into dust, that the very sites of some of the greatest of ancient capitals have slipped from the world's memory. Egypt, Greece, Persia, the Assyrian realm, are great names, once filling earth with their glory, now all but obliterated from the roll of nations. We enter the regions where once sat those old Queens of the East, and look for some reflection of former greatness still lingering on the brows of the inhabitants. We look in vain. Cities are mean; poverty is everywhere; man is degraded, nature half desolate, and the testimony of our senses makes us sceptical as to the truth of history. But search yet further, and lo! silent and inanimate witnesses for the dead rise around. Amid the solitude and the desert, pillar and obelisk, palace and temple, cities immense even in their ruins, mark how the barren sands were once a garden, and the solitude was peopled by busy myriads. Those shattered colonnades, those fallen capitals and mutilated statues, once rose above the dwellings of Hundred-gated Thebes; those mounds of rubbish, now shunned even by the wild Bedouin, cover the wondrous relics of Nineveh; those silent mountains that look down on the lone, ruin-covered plain of Merdusht, once echoed back the shouts of royal Persepolis. Ruins are the voice of past ages chiding the present for its degeneracy. They are like sea-ware on the shore at low water, marking how high the tide of civilisation once rose.

When we consider the remote period at which such edifices were constructed, we are at first surprised by two qualities which they exhibit, sometimes united, sometimes apart—magnitude and beauty. Magnitude always exerts a great influence on the senses; and without seeking to explain how such an effect is produced, it is evident from history that an admiration of the colossal is especially characteristic of the human mind in the early stages of its development. Accordingly, and perhaps also from a recollection of gigantic works before the Flood, the first undertaking of the united race of Postdiluvians was the vastly-imagined Tower of Babel. The first family of man in Europe—the Pelasgi—mute and inglorious in everything else, have left samples of an enormous architecture, whose ruins to this day exist under the title of Cyclopean. This peculiarity is not confined to the shores of the Mediterranean. In the remote East, and in the long undiscovered regions of the West, in Ceylon and in Mexico, the aboriginal races have left their sole memorials in similar masses of masonry. With them size seems to have been everything; it was magnitude which then fascinated the imagination. Even when men are well advanced in civilisation, the same spirit is perceptible among them, and a love of exaggeration, the frequent use of hyperbole, characterises the early literature of all nations.

From the exquisite beauty of much of the architecture, poetry, and sculpture that have come down to us from antiquity, the singular fact is apparent, that the fine arts reached perfection at a time when those conducive to the material comforts were still in infancy. In those days the race of man was yet young; and youth in the species, as in the individual, is the season of the Beautiful. It was a lively love and susceptibility to the charms of nature that peopled the woods and waters, the sunny skies and the sparkling sea, with deities in sympathy with man—that saw in the rainbow a messenger from heaven to earth, and in the thunder of the tempest the wrath of the Most High. The vague ever excites interest; and the mysterious phenomena of nature contributed to fix their attention on her aspects, and consequently on her beauties. Coelum and Terra, heaven and earth—in one word, Nature was the great goddess of paganism. She was the great parent of their Pantheon—from her all other gods drew birth; they were personifications of her powers, and, till the days of the Greeks, it was under forms of her that they were worshipped. This susceptibility to beauty in nature was the parent of the beautiful in art. In stone, in bronze, on the canvas, they strove to reproduce the perfection of form that they beheld in select nature—to attain the same harmony of parts—and thus to awaken in the beholder corresponding emotions of pleasure. Thus art, in different countries, varied with the aspects of nature. The monotonous vastness and horizontal lines of the scenery of Egypt, find a counterpart in the heavy and monotonous grandeur of its temples; and the unhandsome features of its inhabitants, in the half-Negro faces of its gods. In Greece, on the other hand, the variety in its architecture corresponds with the varied aspects of the country; and its exquisite sculpture is but a reflection of the noble lineaments of the people. The showy prettiness of Chinese decoration is typical of the Flowery Realm; and from the exuberance of animal life in Central Asia, springs the profusion of animal forms in the sculpture and architecture of India, Persia, and Assyria.

External circumstances also then fostered genius in architecture. Splendour was the glory of the kings of those days—partly from taste, but not less so from necessity. The moral faculties of their subjects were too weak to be alone regarded: their senses had to be appealed to. As, during the Heroic Age, the king distinguished himself from his army by his valour in the field, so, during peace, he had to distinguish himself from his subjects by his magnificence. The royal mansion, constructed of enduring granite or shining marble, represented the visibility of power; and the people felt that they could as soon shake the globe as overturn the lord of so much might: hence the palaces of Persia. Religion, too, availed herself of like means of impressing the unspiritual mind of the people; while superstition imagined that the gods were pleased by the splendour of the temples reared for their worship. Hence the stupendous temples of Luxor and Carnac, with their huge ornamented propylÆ, and far-stretching avenues of pillars and sphinxes—and the countless other sacred structures of Egypt, whose very ruins have all but perished: hence, too, the rock-temples of Ellora and Elephanta, where the labour of the worshippers has hollowed out of the mountain rock a mansion for their deity, and has sculptured its sides with groups from Hindoo mythology. Even in the New World traces of a similar spirit are to be found; and doubtless the vast ruins recently discovered in Yucatan were designed to magnify the worship of the great sun-god of the ancient Indians.

The noblest source from which architecture can proceed was pre-eminently exhibited in the republics of Greece. The exalted race that peopled that favoured land had passed the stage of intellectual development in which magnitude is the chief object of admiration; and among them the great object of desire was beauty, and their chief characteristic was the love of the beautiful. Among them Despotism was not seen building palaces to exhibit its own glory; it was a people gratifying an elevating passion, and, while doing so, voluntarily adding majesty to the state. Simple and unostentatious in their private dwellings, they lavished genius and splendour in the construction of their public buildings; for the state was but a concentration of themselves, and in its glory they felt they were all partakers. Nevertheless they desired beauty more for itself than for its concomitant splendour; and even in religion they were less worshippers of heaven than adorers of the beautiful. It is the loftiest of delights to say to the beautiful—'I am thy Maker!' and when kneeling before the matchless statues of their gods, the Greeks rather gloried in them as divine creations of their genius, than humbled themselves before them as emblems of their deities. Favoured by blood and climate, by the character of their country, and the advent to its shores of all the knowledge of the old East—the Greeks had a noble career before them; and well did they fulfil their destiny. Genius and power have long departed from the descendants of that lordly race; but mankind still flock to the Hellenic strand to gaze on the divine relics of the past. The sun of Greece has long set—but the land is still radiant with her ruins.

Egypt—that land of silence and mystery—as if to compensate for its total deficiency of written records, has left the greatest number of ruins. From the mouth of the Nile to above the Cataracts, relics of former magnificence stretch away to the borders of the Desert; and even amid the now sandy wastes we stumble at times upon a ruin lordly even in its decay. It tells us the oft-told tale of the triumph of Time. We gaze on the ruin, and see in it a broken purpose—and the strain of our meditations is sad. We think of the mighty monarch its founder—proud of his power, and eager to use it; yet conscious of his evanescence, and resolved to triumph over decay ere it triumphed over him—dreading the forgetfulness of human hearts, and resolving to commit his glory to things less noble, but less perishable than they, and to make the silent marble eloquent with his praise. Those porphyry blocks have come from the far-off Nubian mountains, and earth must have groaned for leagues beneath their weight; the carving of those friezes, and the sculpture of those statues, must have been the labour of years. Alas for the captive and the slave! Hundreds have toiled and sunk on the plain around us—till the royal pile became a cenotaph to slaves. That vase-shaped capital, half imbedded in the sand, has been soiled with the sweat, perhaps dabbled with the blood, of poor goaded beings; and the sound of the lash and the groan of the victim have echoed in halls where splendour and gaiety were thenceforth to dwell. But long centuries have passed since then; and now indignation does not break the calm of melancholy with which we gaze on the broken emblems of departed power. The structure which was to exhibit the glory and resources of a monarch lies shattered and crumbling in fragments; and the lotos-leaf, which everywhere appears on the ruins, is an emblem of the oblivion that shrouds the name of the founder.

But many a ruin that still 'enchants the world' awakens other reflections than on the fall of power. It may be a concentrated history of its architect—it may be the embodiment of the long dream that made up his life. From the inspired moment when first its ideal form filled his mental eye, in fancy we see it haunting his reveries like the memory of a beautiful dream. In sorrow it has come like an angel to gladden his lonely hours; and though adversity crush his spirit, he still clings like a lover to the dream of the soul. At length the object of his life is accomplished; and the edifice, awful in its vastness, yet enchanting in its beauty, stands in the light of day complete. To behold beauty in mental vision is a joy—but to place it before the eyes of men, and see them bow in admiration and love, and to know that it will live in their memories and hearts, elevating and gladdening, and begetting fair shapes kindred to its own—this is joy and triumph. The object which thousands are praising, and which will be the delight and glory of future ages, is his child—it is a part of himself. And yet now it has perished: the hand of man or of Time has struck it to earth. It is a broken idol—and we half feel the anguish at its fall which death has long ago spared its worshipper. The joy, the inspiration of a lifetime—the creature and yet the idol of genius—lies shattered on the sand; and the wild palm-tree rises green and graceful above its remains. In this we behold the moral of ruins—it is Nature triumphing over Art.