Round and round
the mighty walls he watched with mechanical and useless anxiety. Every
stone in the building was eloquent to his lonely heart--beautiful to his
wild imagination. On those barren structures stretched for him the loved
and fertile home; there was the shrine for whose glory his intellect had
been enslaved, for whose honour his youth had been sacrificed! Round and
round the secret recesses and sacred courts he paced with hurried
footstep, cleansing with gentle and industrious hand the stains of blood
and the defilements of warfare from the statues at his side. Sad,
solitary, thoughtful, as in the first days of his apprenticeship to the
gods, he now roved in the same moonlit recesses where Macrinus had
taught him in his youth. As the menacing tumults of the day had aroused
his fierceness, so the stillness of the quiet night awakened his
gentleness. He had combated for the temple in the morning as a son for
a parent, and he now watched over it at night as a miser over his
treasure, as a lover over his mistress, as a mother over her child!
The days passed on; and at length the memorable morning arrived which
was to determine the fate of the last temple that Christian fanaticism
had spared to the admiration of the world.
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