Page:The History of Ink.djvu/65

Rh and "resolved into its original elements." It has disappeared; but the remains with its yellow stain, an imperishable memorial of that humble, nameless workman, more enduring than that which the plaintive man of Uz desired; for if those words had been "graven with an  and lead in the rock forever," that anticipated eternity might have failed of realization by the action of the rain, the frost, the dust, and innumerable imaginable atmospheric vicissitudes, or, (what is worse,) "the wrath of man."—Some Cambyses might have demolished the rock itself, and left no more of the inscription than can now be read of those once carved on the cliffs of Edom, the God-created walls of Petra in the valley of.

This pale rusty on the fragile and easily combustible paper, has outlasted the inscriptions once visible in gigantic characters on the four sides of the Memphitic pyramids; and it is only an incidental result of the intelligence diffused and the learning promoted by the invention thus begun, that we can now read the long-buried records of Nineveh, the epitaphs of the Thebaic kings, and the gravings on the precipitous fronts of the mountains which surround the ruins of Persepolis.