remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble who held
an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by
nearness till they were giants. At length they stood at the main
altar and its hundred perpetual lamps. What a place! Above them the
heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them
an over-arched city of four streets in which stood churches. The
temple became greatest by walking in it; and, when they passed round
one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed
earnestly down.

Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no
art," said he to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with
the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands within
and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of and close
before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract
ideas, said he was perfectly right. Fraischdörfer replied, "The
sublime also here lies only in the brain, for the whole church stands,
after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the
heavens; in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel
anything." He also complained that "the place for the sublime in his
head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments
which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself."
Gaspard, taking everything in a large sense, remarked, "When the
sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and
annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as
evidence the tower of the Minster,[6] and Nature itself, which is not
made smaller by its grasses and villages.

Among so many connoisseurs of art, the Princess enjoyed in silence.