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 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 gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of
century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and
nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward
the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of 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. It was
the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It
was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form. All who
know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and
faces that have vanished—albeit only a trifling score of years gone
by—will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave
eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before
History was born—before tradition had being—things that were, and forms
that moved, in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know
of—and passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the
midst of a strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes.
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 he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful
presence of God.