Ruins

Should the whole frame of nature round him breakAnd stand secure amidst a falling world.

— Ruins

And when 'midst fallen London they surveyBy Time's slow finger written in the dust.

— Ruins

There is a temple in ruin stands,Marble and granite, with grass o'ergrown!

— Ruins

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

— Ruins

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.

— Ruins

The ruins of himself! now worn awayWith age, yet still majestic in decay.

— Ruins

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

— Ruins

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?

— Ruins

Babylon is fallen, is fallen.

— Ruins

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.

— Ruins

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.

— Ruins

For such a numerous hostConfusion worse confounded.

— Ruins

Prostrate the beauteous ruin lies; and allThat shared its shelter, perish in its fall.

— Ruins

Red ruin and the breaking-up of all.

— Ruins

Behold this ruin! 'Twas a skullHas left one trace, one record here.

— Ruins

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?

— Ruins

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.

— Ruins

I do love these ancient ruins.Our foot upon some reverend history.

— Ruins

Where now is Britain?From the dismaying solitude.

— Ruins

Final Ruin fiercely drivesHer ploughshare o'er creation.

— Ruins