It was
only at the expiration of those unheeded years, when the chances of
travel turned his footsteps towards Alexandria, that his faculties burst
from the long bondage which had oppressed them. Then--when he passed
through those gates which he had entered in former years a proud,
ambitious boy, when he walked ungreeted through the ruined temple where
he had once lived illustrious and revered--his dull, cold thoughts arose
strong and vital within him. The spectacle of the scene of his former
glories, which might have awakened despair in others, aroused the
dormant passions, emancipated the stifled energies in him. The projects
of vengeance and the visions of restoration which he had brooded over
for five long years, now rose before him as realised already under the
vivid influence of the desecrated scenes around. As he stood beneath
the shattered porticoes of the sacred place, not a stone crumbling at
his feet but rebuked him for his past inaction, and strengthened him for
daring, for conspiracy, for revenge, in the service of the outrage gods.
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