But the English Reformation, the French Revolution, and Italian Unification have taught us that the monuments of the new faith, instead of being specially exempt from injury, are peculiarly liable to insult and mutilation. Men and nations have measurably ceased to care or expect to perpetuate themselves through the temple and the tomb. The soul of architecture has received a shock. Her throne is the solitude or the waste. She lurks amidst ruins and relics, the very Hagar of art. She that seemed mightiest has proved weakest; her daintier sisters, sculpture and song, have triumphed where she failed. The statues that adorned her porticoes are upright still, but the porticoes themselves are overthrown. The lay, the legend, the chronicle, committed with plying finger to paper or parchment, are living, while the forms of beauty and grandeur entrusted to marble are broken or beneath the sands. Here and there you meet her skeleton in the wilderness, her white arm upraised in sublime self-assertion; but though the story of Zenobia is immortal, there is scarcely a column of Palmyra standing. The very mummy, with his dry papyrus which a spark might annihilate, may chance to survive his pyramid! Nature has turned against her; matter has played her false. She has toiled a thousand years in granite, iron, cedar--in all that seemed solidest, hardest, firmest: her back is bent with honest toil, her hands are roughened with mallet and chisel; yet the dream of a poet traced on calfskin outlasts the vision embodied in travertine or porphyry. If an earthquake shook the Val d'Arno, the canvas of Giotto would survive his campanile.