He entered the magic church, which gave the world blessings, curses, kings, and popes, with the consciousness that, like the world-edifice, it was continually enlarging and receding more and more, the longer one remained in it. They went up to two children of white marble, who held an incense-muscle-shell of yellow marble; the children grew by nearness till they were giants. At length they stood before the main altar and its hundred perpetual lamps;--what a stillness! Above them the heaven's arch of the dome, resting on four inner towers; around them an overarched city, of four streets, in which stood churches. The temple became greatest by walking in it; and when they passed round one column, there stood a new one before them, and holy giants gazed earnestly down. Here was the youth's large heart, after so long a time, filled. "In no art," he said to his father, "is the soul so mightily possessed with the sublime as in architecture; in every other the giant stands in it and in the depths of the soul, but here he stands out of it and close before it." Dian, to whom all images were more clear than abstract ideas, said: "He is perfectly right." Fraischdörfer replied: "The sublimity here also lies only in the brain: for the whole church stands, after all, in something greater, namely, in Rome, and under the heavens, in the presence of which latter we certainly should not feel anything." He also complained, "That the place for the sublime in his head was very much narrowed by the innumerable volutes and monuments which the temple shut up therein at the same time with itself." Gaspard said, taking everything in a large sense: "When the sublime once really appears, it then, by its very nature, absorbs and annihilates all little circumstantial ornaments." He adduced as evidence the tower of the minster,[79] and nature itself, which is not made smaller by its grasses and villages. The Princess, among so many connoisseurs of art, enjoyed in silence.