which once were the fine thriving homes of bale and anguish, have been by time's dilapidation bereft of every little discomfort. For the ice of Nifleheim is melted: the dreadful flames of Tartarus have spluttered out like damp firecrackers: even Aratu, wherein reigned mere oblivion, has been swallowed by oblivion.... Poets build against eternity sometimes in dealing with trifles; but never in erecting the eternal homes of men. Meanwhile it is most gratifying to reflect that, while they lasted, the glories and the terrors of all this celestial architecture divertingly filled many lives with spiritual consolation and salutary dread; have checked extravagance in the way of bloodletting or of chastity or of whatever at the time was vice; have heartened the devout to eat their parents or to burn infidels or to give alms, or to do whatever else at the time was virtue; and have evolved their countless hierarchies of saints and holy persons. Here is no room for irony. Nuns, doubtless, have assumed the veil and entered convents in a religious exaltation as lofty as that with which the virgins of Assyria put on the crown of little cords and went to the temple of Mylitta and their first communion with the first amorous male passer-by. Yet, to uphold the splendors of the paradise of Mohammed his Mussulmans have waged religious wars with a malignity not often surpassed by the servitors of Christ: and Solomon may well have gazed upon the completed Temple, and have beheld the ark of the covenant of the Lord brought in unto the most holy place under the wings of the cherubim, in very much that pious joy with which, from high Tenochtitlan, rapt priests looked down upon the slowly advancing line, two stately miles in length, of warriors who ascended to disembowelment upon the jasper altar of Huitzilopochtli. In fine, these hells and paradises, the while that their bright evanescence lasted, have provided employment, and support, and recreation, and exalted sentiments to boot, for innumerable millions.