owers.

They were real trees and flowers, made to exist for a time by the
sorcery of the masters of spirit power. They had never before known
the outer air. The priests of Harikar had made them, and would
dissipate them as living bodies are dissipated by death.

A sacred opera was chanted by the priests of invention, art, and
spirituality, on their terraces of silver above the trees and flowers.
As the music continued, groups of singers would at times sweep forth
on wings and float in wheeling circles around the throne. Their
delightful choruses swelling upward were like draughts of rich wine,
keen and intoxicating. The priests and spiritual powers marching
beneath filled the vast building with broad recitatives, full of
vividly descriptive passages and finely contrasted measures, until the
soul seemed melted in a sea of bliss.

The throne was bathed and caressed by a blue vapor of incense, while
from the great dome above, filled with figures formed of enamelled
glass, there streamed lights of all mysterious colors, that
illuminated its gleaming sides and lit up the amphitheatre with
ineffable effects.

A warm, rosy beam, falling perpendicularly, enveloped the goddess like
a robe of transparent tissue. She sat, a living statue, the joy of
every heart, the embodiment of a hopeless love that kept the
worshipper in a fever of delicious unrest. Wherever the eye wandered,
it always came back to the goddess; whatever the soul thought, its
last thought was of her.

Amid a tempest of music and the thundering song of two hundred
thousand voices repeating a litany of love, the throne itself began to
revolve upon the silver cone that supported it. A fresh rapture took
possession of the multitude.

In the soul of the goddess what must have been the joy of being
surrounded by such an ocean of adoring love?

As I mused on the scene, I thought of the Coliseum at Rome raised to
the glory of barbaric force, of empire founded on the blood of its
victims, and, being such, has necessarily passed away, becoming a heap
of ruins.

Here, thought I, is a temple founded on a nobler idea, the glory of
the human soul, its ingenuity, art, and spiritual forces.

Many in the outer world would say it was an idolatrous attempt on the
part of the creature to usurp the throne of its Creator. Yet it was
strangely like the religion of such people themselves. There, as here,
I thought, is the same worship of gold, the same dependence on the
mat