Every one of these fabrics of stone might be said to be an immense architectonic phrase, an aphorism in lines. In a phrase culminates and is condensed a whole system of ideas, of thoughts. In the title--_La Vida es Sueño_--of Calderón’s drama, the immortal fellow of “Don Quixote,” is condensed (as Farinelli rightly says in his work _La Vita é un Sogno_, which I have just been reading) “the substance of all earthly philosophies.” It was by a phrase that each of the seven wise men of Greece won a lasting place in the memory of their race; for these seven wise men eternalized themselves in the thought of their people as being the authors of seven single sentences. And a phrase, a civil sentence, civil rather than human, is an edifice of thought in which economy of material and of brute force has achieved its supreme triumph. The Pyramids are phrases of stone which rise up from the sands of the desert; and like an immense phrase, like one of the periods of Demosthenes, or rather of Pericles, which Thucydides has bequeathed to us for ever, stands the Parthenon. And these towers are phrases too, civil phrases, phrases of civility now made one with Nature. I know not how I am to translate to you in sounding words--words that are winged, yet captive, words that fly and soar, yet abide--that which this harmonious phrase of hewn stone, this tower of Monterrey, says to me, says to us all, in the fine cutting light of these benumbing winter mornings, when the frost sleeps idly on its lofty pinnacles; but I know that it is a phrase when I see it clear-cut against the blue of heaven. And if men pass away and yet abide, these stones will abide to tell Nature that once there was Humanity, once there was thought; they will abide to tell of plan, and of order, and of proportion, to the Universe. And why should not the planets which journey through space in obedience to the laws which they themselves communicated to Kepler, understand geometry and mathematics? Is not the whole vast structure of the Universe a great city, the city of God, its supreme Architect and Inhabiter? All this is a dream. True! But this dream of stone, in the clarified frosty light, tells us that dream is what abides, the lasting, the permanent, the substantial, and that on the surface of the dream, like waves on the surface of the sea, roll our sorrows and our joys, our hates and our loves, our memories and our hopes. The waves are of the sea; but the waves pass and the sea abides; the sorrows and the joys, the hates and the loves, the memories and the hopes, are of the dream, the dream of life; but they--sorrows, joys, hates, loves, memories, hopes--pass away and the dream abides. And it abides thus, converted into stone, stone of the earth, but civilized, civil or spiritual stone, a phrase minted for ever, _monumentum ære perennius_, more enduring than bronze.