The muses should never pout: each art should reverently accept its limitations. Though the pen is mightier than pencil or chisel, though only the word and the song are privileged to pass intact from age to age, yet a portion of the soul of plastic art may sometimes baffle decay. Even in ruin, architecture is not without its prouder consolations. _Ex pede, Herculem_. While a bone of her survives, imagination can approximate a resurrection of the departed whole. The malice of her sworn enemies, the elements, is sometimes providentially her salvation; the shrouded lava of Vesuvius embalmed a more vivid presentation of Roman life and manners than lives in the pages of Terence or Plautus. A broken shaft, a fragmentary arch, a section of Cyclopean wall, is at once a poem, a chronicle, and a picture. The ruin is time's authentic seal, without which history were as inconclusive as the myth. The past is a present voice as long as a vestige of its architecture remains. The Column of Trajan is the best orator of the forum now; there is a deeper charm in the living eloquence of the Colosseum than in the dead thunder of the Philippics. [Footnote 88] We are as awed and startled when unexpectedly confronted by some mouldering but still breathing monument of antiquity, as if the form of the deathless evangelist stood bodily before us. [Footnote 88: "Tully was not so eloquent as thou, Thou nameless column with the buried base!"] We perfectly understand and sympathize with the modern instinct that recoils from imparting a more than needful permanence to private dwellings. The home of man is sullied with low cares and offices; beneath the screen and shelter of its roof the worst passions are often nourished, the darkest mysteries are sometimes celebrated. In many an ancient manor, there is scarcely a chamber without its legend of sin, scarcely a floor without its bloodstain. But the _House of God_ is the witness of the virtues, not the vices, of humanity; within its hallowed precincts the casual profanity and levity of the few are quite lost in the earnest adoration of the many; the whispers of blasphemy drowned in the ceaseless tide of general thanksgiving; the rebellious beatings of passion hushed in the solemn chorus of penitence and praise. The longer it endures, the holier it becomes. Its aisles are impregnated with prayer, its vaults enriched with ashes of the blest, its altars radiant with the wine of sacrifice. Behind the doors of the palace and the dwelling, time is sure to plant the spectre and the thorn; behind the doors of the cathedral, the angel and the palm.