I slowly
retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of
the cloisters, the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me,
filled the whole building with echoes.
I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I
had been contemplating, but found they were already falling into
indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had
all become confounded in my recollection, though I had scarcely
taken my foot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this
vast assemblage of sepulchres but a treasury of humiliation--a
huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and
the certainty of oblivion? It is, indeed, the empire of death;
his great shadowy palace where he sits in state mocking at the
relics of human glory and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the
monuments of princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the
immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his
pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to
think of the characters and anecdotes that gave interest to the
past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily
forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of
our recollection, and will in turn be supplanted by his successor
of tomorrow.
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