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Updated: June 20, 2025
The further fact, now made clear from the bas-reliefs, that they wrought all the elaborate carving of the colossi before they proceeded to raise them or put them in place, is an additional argument of their skill, since it shows that they had no fear of any accident happening in the transport.
It will be seen, then, that these outdoor colossi of to-day do not afford us much encouragement to believe that Mr. Bartholdi will be able to surmount the difficulties which have vanquished one sculptor after another in their endeavors to perform similar prodigies. Sculpture is perhaps the most difficult of the arts of design.
They were no longer giants matched with colossi. It resembled Milton and Dante rather than Homer. Demons attacked, spectres resisted. It was heroism become monstrous.
The whole object of arriving at this unearthly hour would be defeated, if, before the sun's forefinger touched the faces of the altar statues, we were not in the sanctuary. No time to study the features of the Colossi, or to search for the grave of Major Tidwell. These things must wait.
Was it not All-Father Odin, on his horse Sleipner, forsaking the new race which had ceased to worship him? The colossi of the Orient Rameses and Brahma and Boodh dwindle into insignificance before this sublime natural monument to the lost gods of the North.
The inner courts and hypostyle halls of the temple contained more colossi. Some, placed with their backs against the outer sides of pillars or walls, were half engaged in the masonry, and built up in courses.
How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence.
What would statues of the usual size, or neat porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen or lean on the pillars of the interior?"
Long before Cheops had planted the basement-stone of his pyramids, when Sphinx and Colossi had not yet been fashioned into their huge existence, and the untouched quarry had given out neither temple nor monument, the young Egyptian, as he looked along the Nile, may have mourned that he was born too late.
They had seen the Pyramids which had already stood for twenty centuries, the hieroglyph-covered obelisks of Luxor, avenues of silent and mysterious sphinxes, colossi of monarchs who reigned in the morning of the world. In the halls of Esar-haddon they had stood before the thrones of grim old Assyrian kings, guarded by winged bulls.
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