the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is
said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses
hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings; but
there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this
county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by
their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to
commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta
than all the ruins of the East! Towers and temples are the luxury
of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the
bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor
is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling
extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia,
when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are
possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of
themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if
equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One
piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high
as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of
Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall
that bounds an honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that
has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and
civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid
temples; but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the
stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself
alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them
so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough
to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,
whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the
Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent
some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the