Left: Elephanta. Interior View of Rock-cut Cave. Right: Entrance to the Caves. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
These celebrated Caves are situated in the beautiful island of their own name. It is composed of two hills, with a narrow valley between them. Ascending the nar row path where the two hills are knit together, there lies below the superb prospect of the sea and the adjacent shores. Gradually an open space is gained, and we come suddenly on the grand entrance of a magnificent temple, whose huge massy columns seem to give support to the whole mountain which is above. The entrance into the temple, which is entirely hewn out of a stone resembling porphyry, is by two massy pillars forming three openings, under a steep rock overhung by reeds and wild shrubs.
What know we of them:
Nothing—there they stand,
Gloomy as night, inscrutible as fate.
Altars no more divine, and shrines which know
Nor priests, nor votaries, nor sacrifice;
The stranger's wonder all their worship now.
And yet coeval as the native rock
Seem they with mother earth—immutable.
Time—tempest—warfare—ordinary decay,
Is not for these. The memory of man
Has lost their rise—although they are his work.
Two senses here are present; one of Power,
And one of Nothingness; doth it not mock
The mighty mind to see the meaner part,
The task it taught its hands, outlast itself!
The temple was a type, a thing of stone,
Built by laborious days which made up years;
The creed which hallow'd it was of the soul;
And yet the creed hath past—the temple stands.
The high beliefs which raised themselves to heaven;
The general truths on which religions grow;
The strong necessity of self-restraint;
The needful comfort of some future hope
Than that whose promise only binds to-day,
And future fear, parent of many faiths:
Those vast desires, unquenchable, which sweep
Beyond the limits of our little world,
And know there is another by themselves;
These constitute the spiritual of man.
"Tis they who elevate and who redeem,
By some great purpose, some on-looking end,
The mere brute exercise of common strength.
Yet these have left no trace. The mighty shrine,
Undeified, speaks force, and only force,
Man's meanest attribute.
Bibliography
Landon, Latitia E. The Poetical Works of Miss Landon. Philadelphia: E.L. Cary and A. Hart, 1839. Hathi Trust Digital Library version of a copy in the New York Public Library. Web. 17 July 2020.
Last modified 18 July 2020