eur and tranquillity of line; in antique
Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic
majesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation of
an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the
Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the
last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic
cathedral.

Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is
necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, two
registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone and
the Bible of paper. No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles,
laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret the
visible majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets
formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human
mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to the
bell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg. The past must be reread upon these
pages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be admired
and perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printing
erects in its turn must not be denied.

That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has calculated,
that if all the volumes which have issued from the press since
Gutenberg's day were to be piled one upon another, they would fill
the space between the earth and the moon; but it is not that sort of
grandeur of which we wished to speak. Nevertheless, when one tries to
collect in one's mind a comprehensive image of the total products of
printing down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like an
immense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity
toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in the
profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligence. It is
the hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with their
honey.

The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on its
staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior.
Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, and
laces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes. There, every individual
work, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place and
its projection. Harmony results from the whole. From the cathedral of
Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell towers are
pi