Armorica

“ I see the Roman city and soil full of temples to gods and goddesses, from all the known lands of the world, that they might reply to the still more urgent questionings of humanity:
“Is there a God?—What and who is He? Is there a life after death for us who suffer, love, and die? Is there reparation for those who testify to the truth, and fall victims to lies? What have we to hope for? What shall we believe?”
And the temples multiply ever more and more, and the gods and their priests increase. ”

“ Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime— Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods, From Jove to Jesus—spared and blest by time; Looking tranquillity, while falls or nods Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods His way through thorns to ashes—glorious dome! Shalt thou not last?—Time's scythe and tyrants' rods Shiver upon thee—sanctuary and home Of art and piety—Pantheon!—pride of Rome! ”

“ Ye saw the foundations of Rome laid;—now ye look down upon its ruins. In comparison with yours, man's life dwindles to a moment. Like the flower at your foot, he blooms for an instant, and sinks into the tomb. Nay, what is a nation's duration, when weighed against thine? Even the forests that wave on your slopes will outlast empires. Proud piles, how do ye stamp with insignificance man's greatest labours! This glorious edifice on which I stand,—ages was it in building; myriads of hands helped to rear it; and yet, in comparison with your gigantic masses, what is it?—a mere speck. ”

“ Above the ruin of civilization, now fulfilled in the microcosm of his own being, the menacing shadow of a forgotten deity peered down upon the earth, yet upon one detail of it chiefly—the human group that had been wildly dancing, but that now chanted in solemn conclave about a forest altar. ”

“ Nor is there any temple or shrine seen in their country, nor even any cabin thatched with straw, their only idea of religion being to plunge a naked sword into the ground with barbaric ceremonies, and then they worship that with great respect, as Mars, the presiding deity of the regions over which they wander. ”

“ Thus, in the second century A.D., the Empire spread, in the sun of the pax Romana, which illumined the world, its countless marble-decked cities, as our time spreads, in the sun of modern civilisation, the confused and smoky opulence of its cities, large and moderate-sized, crowded, disordered, a blaze of light by night, bristling with chimneys and shrouded in black fog by day. ”

“ We honour you. And though no sculptured marble transmit your fame, a nobler monument shall be yours—the happy hearts of [Pg 18] unborn millions shall be the shrine in which your names will be treasured. In your high example—in your noble disinterestedness—in your entire subordination of every thought, and act, and scheme, and interest, to the heaven-born purpose of human regeneration and human elevation, we hear the language of encouragement. ”

“ Rome a wand of sweet-flag withered to the pith;
Growing, growing, all the glory going.
Palsy shakes the planets, frost has chilled the sun,
In a crushing silence the All is dead and done.
Growing, growing, all the glory going.
II
Going, going, all the glory growing,
See it stir and flutter; that is singing, hark!
Singing in the caverns of the primal dark.
Going, going, all the glory growing.
What is in the making, what immortal plan
Draws to its unfolding? 'Tis the Soul of man.
Going, going, all the glory growing. ”

“ Monuments and ruins have been disinterred in the ancient seats of human power, in the oriental world, and inscriptions deciphered, which give vitality to ancient history. Ethnology has arisen to hold up the light of her resplendent lamp, amid these ruins, to guide the footsteps of letters, science and piety. ”

“ Long-treasured race-traditions, still to live,
And, living, pass through ages yet unborn.
So, with his glowing words of metaphor,
Grows green the old faith's beauty; and his prayers
Rise up as incense from the shrine.—He stands
Before the Ark, and in his hands he holds
A thousand prayers, to rise as one, and bear
A people's anguish to the throne of God. ”

“ As the world disintegrated, and the imagination everywhere acquired power, and with power wealth and the means of expression, an entirely new architecture sprang up in the East, whose growth closely followed upon the barbarian invasions and the progressive failure of the Roman blood. ”

“ For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth the lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve. ”

“ MINOR DEITIES. A glance at some of the minor, and local deities must conclude our review of the gods of the Barrier.
The deities of Greece and Rome were without number. Every fountain and river, every hill and forest, had its tutelary deity; every product of earth, air, or sea, its guardian; every place its genius; every household its penates. The antiquities found on the Wall furnish us with numerous illustrations of this fact. The engraving represents an altar which was found at Birdoswald, and is now at Lanercost. ”

“ Fortress, and palace, and temple, and tower,
Filling the world with the proof of his power.
Over the dust that awaits him, man,
Building the walls that his pride doth plan,
Dreams they will stand in the light of the sun
Bearing his name till Time is done.
II The monuments of mortals
Are as the glory of the grass;
Through Time's dim portals
A voiceless, viewless wind doth pass,
The blossoms fall before it in a day,
The forest monarchs year by year decay,
And man's great buildings slowly fade away. ”

“ You have initiative that once illuminated would create an empire fairer than any ever raised in marble. You have harmony lying latent in the vast octaves of your being, which if awakened into melody would sooth, comfort, restore, and purify the passions of a world. You have beauty, matchless in forms of grace, which if breathed into marble, or spread in soul colors upon the canvass would adorn the palaces of kings. ”

“ What subject of extended inquiry have we in this word, ranging from the cementless clefts between the couchant stones of the walls of the kings of Rome, whose iron rivets you had but the other day placed in your hands by their discoverer, through the grip of the stones of the Tower of the Death-watch, to the subtle joints in the marble armour of the Florentine Baptistery!
Our own work must certainly be left with a rough surface at this place, and we will fit the edges of it to our next piece of study as closely as we may. ”

“ Through these bright orbs’ dark centres darts a ray!
Of nature universal threads the whole!
And hangs creation, like a precious gem,
Though little, on the footstool of his throne!
That little gem, how large! A weight let fall
From a fix’d star, in ages can it reach
This distant earth! Say, then, Lorenzo! where,
Where, ends this mighty building? where, begin
The suburbs of creation? where, the wall 1520
Whose battlements look o’er into the vale
Of non-existence! Nothing’s strange abode! ”

“ Despoiled yet perfect, with thy circle spreads A holiness appealing to all hearts— To art a model; and to him who treads Rome for the sake of ages, Glory sheds Her light through thy sole aperture; to those Who worship, here are altars for their beads; And they who feel for genius may repose Their eyes on honoured forms, whose busts around them close. ”

“ Each invasion which we have suffered, each revolution through which we have passed, are written down for us in unmistakeable characters. The phases of our Religion, the rise or fall of our Art, are alike told us by the grey mouldings and arches of the humblest parish Church as by our Abbeys and Cathedrals. ”

“ And flings that light o'er Rome,
Which when her very fragments cease,
Still crowns her history's dome?
'Tis truth's great warfare bravely fought,
That hallows in the core,
A mount—a plain—a barren spot—
With fame which dies no more.
And when can earth forget to glow,
Beside each glorious shrine?
Not till yon stars shall dart below,
And sun shall cease to shine.
{164} TO SPRING.
Hail, beauteous maiden, gentle spring! ”

“ How the tall temples, as to meet their gods,
Ascend the skies! the proud triumphal arch
Shows us half heaven beneath its ample bend.
High through mid-air, here, streams are taught to flow;
Whole rivers, there, laid by in basins, sleep.
Here, plains turn oceans; there, vast oceans join
Through kingdoms channell’d deep from shore to shore;
And changed creation takes its face from man.
Beats thy brave breast for formidable scenes,
Where fame and empire wait upon the sword? 790
See fields in blood; hear naval thunders rise;
Britannia’s voice! that awes the world to peace. ”

“ Fortunately, all men did not merely look at the ruins and pass on their way voicing their amazement. Some were so fascinated by what they saw that they could not leave it, and these are gradually unfolding to us one of the most romantic stories in the world, a romance beside which the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is but a single chapter. ”

“ But I love the gold and the silk which clothe the priest of Rome, and his celibacy, and the confessional, and purgatory: and in the darkness of an Italian cathedral, incense-laden and mysterious, I believe with all my heart in the miracle of the Mass. ”

“ Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,—and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment, of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America, or the steppes of Asia. ”

“ How calmly they sleep—those warriors who once filled the world with the tumult of their deeds! If you go into St. Mary's, in the Temple, you will stand above the dust of the Crusaders and see the beautiful copper effigies of them, recumbent on the marble pavement, and feel and know, as perhaps you never did before, the calm that follows the tempest. ”

“ Vast must have been the labour of man’s hands to lift the massive table of rock upon the supporting shafts—relics of an age when they were the only architecture, the only national monuments; when savage ancestors in lion skins, with stone weapons, led by white-robed Druid priests, came solemnly here and left the mistletoe wreath upon these Houses of Death for their adored warriors. ”

“ Creation followed destruction, and the death-song was succeeded by a melodious birth-song. All suffering and sorrow were over-ruled. Future ages were the better for such sad calamities. Temples were destroyed, but the sublime ideas of beauty and grace by which they were erected still survive. Armies were annihilated, but military science was not lost. ”

“ For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of this time what the long-lost bliss of Elysium and the Golden Age had been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist--the theme of much vivid imagery and highly-coloured word-painting.
Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world with light, all the elements glow in healing warmth; as the shades of night fade, day rises.... ”

“ For seven days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense, while the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited them, with offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity, according to the devotion of each. ”

“ The ornamented parts of the Greek and Roman Orders, figure sculpture apart, show how two cognate nations, each with transcendent abilities but of an entirely different range, abstracted the beauties of plants, and conferred them on stone and marble to emphasize and adorn the rigid forms of Architecture ”

“ Should we then have seen so many magnificent temples built all over the land to the true God, and not rather instead of them a stone Jupiter, an iron Mars, a wooden Apollo, a marble Venus, to whom thou wouldst then have offered sacrifice with all kinds of uncouth ceremonies? ”

“ Extremes meet: as I looked down from the roof of the boat upon the giants of the forest, which had for so many centuries reared their heads undisturbed, but now lay prostrate before civilisation, the same feelings were conjured up in my mind as when I have, in my wanderings, surveyed such fragments of dismembered empires as the ruins of Carthage or of Rome. ”

“ When the revolution which Thou, being desired, makest eternal, [4] made me attent unto itself with the harmony which Thou attunest and modulatest, so much of the heaven then seemed to me enkindled by the flame of the sun, that rain or river never made so broad a lake. ”

“ Rome, like Babylon, shall fall!—and the Powers of the Church shall be judged as the Powers of Darkness rather than of Light, because they have rejected the Word of their Master, and ‘teach for doctrine the commandments of men’! Disaster shall follow swift upon disaster, and the cup of trembling shall be drained again to its last dregs, as in the olden days, unless,—unless perchance—You will come out with Me! ”

“ From the moment, of course, that you go into any Italian church for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of; you treat the place like an orifice in the peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual function—or, at the worst, an amorous one—to feed one's eyes on the moulten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and thickens the air with its richness. ”

“ Consider the force which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of men to whom the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in the midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls were saved of old,—a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as broad as the earth and as merciless as the sea,—and who saw the actual and literal edifice of the Church raised up, itself like an ark in the midst of the waters. ”