Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political

SOLEMN REFLECTIONS.
[An Extract from Salmagundi.]

"How futile are all our efforts to evade the obliterating hand of time! As I traversed the dreary wastes of Egypt, on my journey to Grand Cairo, I stopped my camel for a while, and contemplated in awful admiration, the stupendous pyramids--An appalling silence prevailed around; such an reigns in the wilderness when the tempest is hushed, and the beasts of prey have retired to their dens. The myriads that had once been employed in rearing these lofty mementoes of human vanity, whose busy hum once enlivened the solitude of the desert--had all been swept from the earth by the irresistable arm of death—all were mingled with their native dust--all were forgotten! Even the mighty names which these sepulchres were designed to perpetuate, had long since faded from remembrance; history and tradition afford but vague conjectures, and the pyramids imparted a humiliating lesson to the candidate for immortality. Alas ! alas ! said I to myself, how mutable are the foundations on which our proudest hopes of future fame are reposed. He who imagines he has secured to himself the meed of deathless renown, indulges in deluding visions, which only bespeak the vanity of the dreamer. The storied obelisk --the triumphal arch-the swelling dome, shall crumble into dust, and the names they would preserve from oblivion, shall often pass away, before their own duration is accomplished."