Egypt was the country, of all others, from that mixture of the melancholy and the voluptuous, which marked the character of her people, her religion, and her scenery, to affect deeply a temperament and fancy like mine, and keep tremblingly alive the sensibilities of both. Wherever I turned, I saw the desert and the garden, mingling their bloom and desolation together. I saw the love-bower and the tomb standing side by side, and pleasure and death keeping hourly watch upon each other. In the very luxury of the climate there was the same saddening influence. The monotonous splendour of the days, the solemn radiance of the nights—all tended to cherish that ardent melancholy, the offspring of passion and of thought, which had so long been the inmate of my soul.
When I sailed from Alexandria, the inundation of the Nile was at its full. The whole valley of Egypt lay covered by its flood; and, as I saw around me, in the light of the setting sun, shrines, palaces, and monuments, encircled by the waters, I could almost fancy that I beheld the sinking island of Atalantis, on the last evening its temples were visible above the wave. Such varieties, too, of animation as presented themselves on every side!—
While, far as sight can reach, beneath as clear
And blue a heaven as ever bless’d this sphere,
Gardens, and pillar’d streets, and porphyry domes,
And high-built temples, fit to be the homes
Of mighty gods, and pyramids, whose hour
Outlasts all time, above the waters tower!
Then, too, the scenes of pomp and joy, that make
One theatre of this vast, peopled lake,