Mirza's Vision; and there is nothing left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti pasturing in their places. Chapter XVII The Beginnings What a singular shape of a Man; shape of a Time, have we in this Abbot Samson and his history; how strangely do modes, creeds, formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the figure of the man! Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life. They are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's Life; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they have _vitality_ withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him! No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world without skin and tissues. No; first of all, these have to fashion themselves,--as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into oyster-shell; all living objects do by necessity form to themselves a skin. And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead;_ as all Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do! When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; till no _heart_ any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous, calcified are they; and all over it has now grown mere calcified oystershell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost to the very heart of the poor man:--yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite obstructed; once more, he cannot go abroad and do business in the world; it is time that _he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now be distant!