No doubt they had once been the entrances to a palace, of which, however, no traces were now to be seen, though probably its ruins lay under the rising mound.
Gone! quite gone! the way that everything must go.

Like the nobles and the ladies who lived within their gates, these cities have had their day, and now they are as Babylon and Nineveh, and as London and Paris will one day be.

Nothing may endure.
That is the inexorable law.

Men and women, empires and cities, thrones, principalities, and powers, mountains, rivers, and unfathomed seas, worlds, spaces, and universes, all have their day, and all must go.

In this ruined and forgotten place the moralist may behold a symbol of the universal destiny.