Ruins

"All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage."

"Ruins of Ind! Here, too, with busy hand, Hath man built shrines, and gorgeous cities plann'd, That Time may mock his toil?—and must he still For weeds and reptiles ply his plastic skill?"

"I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart [sic]. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"We wonder — and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

"Should the whole frame of nature round him break In ruin and confusion hurled, He, unconcerned, would hear the mighty crack, And stand secure amidst a falling world."

"And when 'midst fallen London they survey The stone where Alexander's ashes lay, Shall own with humble pride the lesson just By Time's slow finger written in the dust."

"There is a temple in ruin stands, Fashion'd by long forgotten hands: Two or three columns, and many a stone, Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!"

"While in the progress of their long decay, Thrones sink to dust, and nations pass away."

"What cities, as great as this, have … promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others…. Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins."

"The ruins of himself! now worn away With age, yet still majestic in decay."

"For, to make deserts, God, who rules mankind, Begins with kings, and ends the work by wind."

"History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription moulders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?"

"Babylon is fallen, is fallen."

"When I have been indulging this thought I have, in imagination, seen the Britons of some future century, walking by the banks of the Thames, then overgrown with weeds and almost impassable with rubbish. The father points to his son where stood St. Paul's, the Monument, the Bank, the Mansion House, and other places of the first distinction."

"Gaudensque viam fecisse ruina."

"She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's."

"For such a numerous host Fled not in silence through the frighted deep With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded."

"Prostrate the beauteous ruin lies; and all That shared its shelter, perish in its fall."

"In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cost the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians."

"Red ruin and the breaking-up of all."

"Behold this ruin! 'Twas a skull Once of ethereal spirit full! This narrow cell was Life's retreat; This place was Thought's mysterious seat! What beauteous pictures fill'd that spot, What dreams of pleasure, long forgot! Nor Love, nor Joy, nor Hope, nor Fear, Has left one trace, one record here."

"Etiam quæ sibi quisque timebat Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere."

"Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?"

"The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, in time a Vergil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra."

"I do love these ancient ruins. We never tread upon them but we set Our foot upon some reverend history."

"Where now is Britain? * * * * Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude."

"Final Ruin fiercely drives Her ploughshare o'er creation."

"The value of ruins is still today directly dependent on the degree to which their destruction is visible, for that allows their very status as cultural heritage to be experienced directly."