that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was
capable.

Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and
of course, as I told them, this would never do.




_Empty Shells_


They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old
worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation,
and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted
universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us,
who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense
modern Cosmos in which we live--the great Creation of granite,
planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so
pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own
creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think
to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.

But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal
spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy
vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in
those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a
prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to
surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and
cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow