These vast buildings, so elegant in decoration, so aged, so satisfying to the beholder, as remarkable works of skill in decorative and constructive points of view, are great museums and libraries of themselves; and to the reflective observer there _are_ "sermons in stones." When here and at like places, we are amid the results of the anticipations and prayers and labors of centuries. We go back to the day when a lot of mortals, full of a pious aspiration for the good and the true,--yet superstitious,--were travelling over these spots in quest of a best place for study and repose; and they at last here rested, and founded an abbey or monastery, a priory it may be, or a simple nunnery. By-and-by the foundation of a great church was to be laid, but with no hope or expectation of ever seeing those foundation walls of an entire cathedral reach even the earth's surface: comprehending the scheme, they plied themselves to the task, and labored and died; others came, the walls arose, and centuries passed. Tower, battlement, and roof climbed heavenward, and then came consecration and worship, but never rest. Death of prelate, then monuments were in order; repairs of cathedral; civil wars, rebellions, destruction of the art-work of centuries; overturnings of doctrines, disputes, and surrender of cathedral, and all its sacred belongings come; new doctrines are inaugurated, and become the law of the land. Generations after generations are born and die. The cathedral grows old, aged; the grounds only remain as they were; and _not_ as they were, for the soil is raised by the dust of the thousands that are buried and moulder in it, and so, in transfigured glory, even the old trees that throw their grateful shadows have in their fibre earth that was once the royal bone and flesh and sinew of bishop, cardinal, or king. At places in cathedral premises are charnel houses, or rooms where are deposited bones and remains exhumed, or taken from tombs, and these are thrown into promiscuous heaps to moulder on a little longer, and, having become resolved back to mother earth, to be quietly shovelled out as food for grass and flowers on the great lawns. These are the seen, the temporal; but the unseen, the eternal, is no less fact, nor less real, for the influence these men exerted lives and acts. The mortal is greater than any material thing he builds. That decays, and as an organized thing ceases to be, but the influence of thought dies never. We know not into whose little mass of earth, whose narrow house, the rootlets of the tree whose branches shade us have gone, and taken up their infinitesimal particles of human earth, and carried it on to make leaf and blossom, or fibre of wood or bark. We know it has been done, and is yet doing, and has been so for centuries; for, as Shakespeare has it:--