Look about you, man; where are the multitudes that once peopled these prairies; the kings and the palaces; the riches and the mightinesses of this desert ?" "Where are the monuments that would prove the truth of so vague a theory ?" "I know not what you call a monument." "The works of man! The glories of Thebes and Balbec--columns, catacombs, and pyramids! standing amid the sands of the East, like wrecks on a rocky shore, to testify to the storms of ages!" "They are gone.

Time has lasted too long for them.

For why?
Time was made by the Lord, and they were made by man.

This very spot of reeds and grass, on which you now sit, may once have been the garden of some mighty king.

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.
The tree blossoms, and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers, and even the seed is lost! Go, count the rings of the oak and of the sycamore; they lie in circles, one about another, until the eye is blinded in striving to make out their numbers; and yet a full change of the seasons comes round while the stem is winding one of these little lines about itself, like the buffaloe changing his coat, or the buck his horns; and what does it all amount to?
There does the noble tree fill its place in the forest, loftier, and grander, and richer, and more difficult to imitate, than any of your pitiful pillars, for a thousand years, until the time which the Lord hath given it is full.