No desolation resulting solely from the operations of Nature, even in her least kindly mood, can ever suffice to speak to the imagination as the change and decay of the works of man's hand speak.

To produce the effect of desolation in its highest degree man must have at some former period been present on the scene, and the remains of his work must be there to show that activity, life, energy, has once existed where it exists no more.

Nature is always and everywhere progressive, and no sentiment of sadness belongs to progress.
Man's ruined work alone imparts the suggestion--( a delusive one, indeed, but most forcible)--of falling back from the better to the worse.
Wonderfully eloquent after this fashion are the temples of Paestum, far away there to the south beyond Naples, on the flat strip of miserably cultivated soil between the Apennines and the Mediterranean.

But they are too far gone in ruin and decay to speak with so living a voice of sadness as does this old Byzantine church.

The human element is at Paestum too far away,--too utterly dead and forgotten.