And yet withal has there not been realised somewhat?  Consider (to go no further) these strong Stone-edifices, and what they hold!  Mud-Town of the Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum or Barisiorum) has paved itself, has spread over all the Seine Islands, and far and wide on each bank, and become City of Paris, sometimes boasting to be ‘Athens of Europe,’ and even ‘Capital of the Universe.’  Stone towers frown aloft; long-lasting, grim with a thousand years.  Cathedrals are there, and a Creed (or memory of a Creed) in them; Palaces, and a State and Law.  Thou seest the Smoke-vapour; unextinguished Breath as of a thing living.  Labour’s thousand hammers ring on her anvils:  also a more miraculous Labour works noiselessly, not with the Hand but with the Thought.  How have cunning workmen in all crafts, with their cunning head and right-hand, tamed the Four Elements to be their ministers; yoking the winds to their Sea-chariot, making the very Stars their Nautical Timepiece;—­and written and collected a Bibliotheque du Roi; among whose Books is the Hebrew Book!  A wondrous race of creatures:  these have been realised, and what of Skill is in these:  call not the Past Time, with all its confused wretchednesses, a lost one.

Observe, however, that of man’s whole terrestrial possessions and attainments, unspeakably the noblest are his Symbols, divine or divine-seeming; under which he marches and fights, with victorious assurance, in this life-battle:  what we can call his Realised Ideals.  Of which realised ideals, omitting the rest, consider only these two:  his Church, or spiritual Guidance; his Kingship, or temporal one.  The Church:  what a word was there; richer than Golconda and the treasures of the world!  In the heart of the remotest mountains rises the little Kirk; the Dead all slumbering round it, under their white memorial-stones, ’in hope of a happy resurrection:’—­dull wert thou, O Reader, if never in any hour (say of moaning midnight, when such Kirk hung spectral in the sky, and Being was as if swallowed up of Darkness) it spoke to thee—­things unspeakable, that went into thy soul’s soul.  Strong was he that had a Church, what we can call a Church:  he stood thereby, though ‘in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities,’ yet manlike towards God and man; the vague shoreless Universe had become for him a firm city, and dwelling which he knew.  Such virtue was in Belief; in these words, well spoken:  I believe.  Well might men prize their Credo, and raise stateliest Temples for it, and reverend Hierarchies, and give it the tithe of their substance; it was worth living for and dying for.