-echoing no more to the hummings of the Attic bee? Did they pile
up out of the waves that palace beyond it, or that Exchange? or fill
that Temple of Neptune with breathing brass and blushing marble? Did
they build that Timonium on the point, where Antony, worsted at Actium,
forgot his shame in Cleopatra's arms? Did they quarry out that island of
Antirrhodus into a nest of docks, or cover those waters with the sails
of every nation under heaven? Speak! Thou son of bats and moles--thou
six feet of sand--thou mummy out of the cliff caverns! Can monks do
works like these?'

'Other men have laboured, and we have entered into their labours,'
answered Philammon, trying to seem as unconcerned as he could. He was,
indeed, too utterly astonished to be angry at anything. The overwhelming
vastness, multiplicity, and magnificence of the whole scene; the range
of buildings, such as mother earth never, perhaps, carried on her lap
before or since, the extraordinary variety of form-the pure Doric and
Ionic of the earlier Ptolemies, the barbaric and confused gorgeousness
of the later Roman, and here and there an imitation of the grand
elephantine style of old Egypt, its gaudy colours relieving, while they
deepened, the effect of its massive and simple outlines; the eternal
repose of that great belt of stone contrasting with the restless ripple
of the glittering harbour, and the busy sails which crowded out into
the sea beyond, like white doves taking their flight into boundless
space?--all dazzled, overpowered, saddened him.... This was the
world.... Was it not beautiful?.... Must not the men who made all this
have been--if not great.... yet.... he knew not what? Surely they had
great souls and noble thoughts in them! Surely there was something
godlike in being able to create such things! Not for themselves alone,
too; but for a nation--for generations yet unborn.... And there was the
sea.... and beyond it, nations of men innumerable .... His imagination
was dizzy with thinking of them. Were they all doomed--lost?.... Had God
no love for them?

At last, recovering himself, he recollected his errand, and again asked
his way to the archbishop's house.

'This way, O youthful nonentity!' answered the little man, leading the
way round the great front of the Caesareum, at the foot of the obelisks.

Philammon's eye fell on some new masonry in the pediment, ornamented
with Christian symbols.

'How? Is this a church?'

'It is the Caesareum