Its Beauty Of Form Is Like The Chiselled
Loveliness Of A Perfect Sonnet.
While the world lasts, no architect
can arise to create a building more satisfying, more calm with the
calm of faultlessness, more serene with a just serenity.
Or so it
seems to me. I think of the most lovely buildings I know in Europe - of
the Alhambra at Granada, of the Cappella Palatina in the palace at
Palermo. And Edfu I place with them - Edfu utterly different from them,
more different, perhaps, even than they are from each other, but akin
to them, as all great beauty is mysteriously akin. I have spent
morning after morning in the Alhambra, and many and many an hour in
the Cappella Palatina; and never have I been weary of either, or
longed to go away. And this same sweet desire to stay came over me in
Edfu. The /Loulia/ was tied up by the high bank of the Nile. The
sailors were glad to rest. There was no steamer sounding its hideous
siren to call me to its crowded deck. So I yielded to my desire, and
for long I stayed in Edfu. And when at last I left it I said to
myself, "This is a supreme thing," and I knew that within me had
suddenly developed the curious passion for buildings that some people
never feel, and that others feel ever growing and growing.
Yes, Edfu is supreme. No alteration could improve it. Any change made
in it, however slight, could only be harmful to it.
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