But When I See That Almost Airy Loveliness Of Stone, So Simply Elegant, So, Somehow, Spring-Like In Its Pale-Colored Beauty, Its Happy, Daffodil Charm, With Its Touch Of The Greek - The Sensitive Hand From Attica Stretched Out Over Nubia - I Always Think Of Shelley.

I think of Shelley the youth who dived down into the pool so deep that it seemed he was lost for ever to the sun.

I think of Shelley the poet, full of a lyric ecstasy, who was himself like an embodied

"Longing for something afar From the sphere of our sorrow."

Lyrical Philae is like a temple of dreams, and of all poets Shelley might have dreamed the dream and have told it to the world in a song.

For all its solidity, there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the spirit of Isis?

I have heard a clever critic and antiquarian declare that he is not very fond of Philae; that he feels a certain "spuriousness" in the temple due to the mingling of Greek with Egyptian influences. He may be right.

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