Religion and art were alone then democratic; alone expounded to them the original equality of man. Thus they looked upon these temples, which art beautified for faith, as peculiarly their own, their refuge, their solace, their ark of safety in those times of war and trouble. They earnestly and devoutly believed them to be the sanctuaries of the risen God, in which dwelt his glorified Body. With the first rays of the sun flushing with roseate hues the mystic beauty of the temple, they congregated there to receive, in the glorious unity of a common humanity, Him whom the heavens cannot contain--the Son of God. They did not think, they felt; they could not reason, but they heard the church. Naive, simple, and trusting souls, with the Virgin to smile upon them, and the saints to pray for them. It cannot surely be denied that art is full of indefinite and instinctive longing for the infinite. Poetry is full of its pining voice. Chateaubriand says: 'When we are alone with nature, the feeling of the infinite forces itself irresistibly upon us. When the universe with its inexhaustible variety opens before us, when we contemplate the myriads of stars moving in ever-mystic harmony through the limitless immensity of space, when we gaze upon the ocean mingling with the sky in the boundless distance of the far horizon, when the earth and sea are rocked into profound calm, and creation itself seems wrapped in mystic contemplation--an undefinable feeling of melancholy seizes upon us, unknown desires awaken in the soul, they seem to call us into other countries far beyond the limits of the known--must it not then be the vague feeling after, the dim longing for, the infinite, which at such moments we feel strangely stirring in the calm depths of the divining soul?' We find the same yearning breathing through the following beautiful poem of Mrs. Osgood's: 'As plains the home-sick ocean shell Far from its own remembered sea, Repeating, like a fairy spell, Of love, the charmed melody It learned within that whispering wave, Whose wondrous and mysterious tone Still wildly haunts its winding cave Of pearl, with softest music-moan-- 'So asks my home-sick soul below, For something loved, yet undefined; So mourns to mingle with the flow Of music from the Eternal Mind; So murmurs, with its childlike sigh, The melody it learned above, To which no echo may reply Save from thy voice, Eternal Love!'