Look at this wine, how pure it is, how fragrant; and yet it was trodden from the grape by the brawny feet of the vintagers.

And those full ears of corn! They gleam golden yellow, and will yield us snow-white meal when they are ground, and yet they grew from a rotting seed.

Lately you were praising to me the beauty of the great Hall of Columns nearly completed in the Temple of Amon over yonder in Thebes.
[Begun by Rameses I.continued by Seti I., completed by Rameses II.
The remains of this immense hall, with its 134 columns, have not their equal in the world.] How posterity will admire it! I saw that Hall arise.

There lay masses of freestone in wild confusion, dust in heaps that took away my breath, and three months since I was sent over there, because above a hundred workmen engaged in stone-polishing under the burning sun had been beaten to death.

Were I a poet like you, I would show you a hundred similar pictures, in which you would not find much beauty.