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Updated: June 18, 2025
We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." We devote our energies to the propagation of a religion which Reason, that pitiless monarch of the mind, tells us must as inevitably pass as did those of Isis and Bel and Cybele, leaving in the earth's all-absorbing bosom only a few shattered altars and broken fanes.
This reflection comforted me somewhat, and whilst I thus mused I remained standing with my eyes upon the little group of fanciful fanes and spires of ice on the edge of the abrupt hollow. I had been too preoccupied to take close notice; on a sudden I started, amazed by an appearance too exquisitely perfect to be credible.
The contrast between the parterres, blazing with color, and the sylvan background, the undulating paths over romantic heights, the fanes and the fountains, the glittering statues, and the Babylonian terraces, formed a whole, much of which was beautiful, and all of which was striking and singular. "Perhaps too many temples," said Lothair; "but this ancestor of mine had some imagination."
The august front of the scene, and its three grand streets of fanes and palaces, inspired me with the loftiest sentiments of the Grecian drama; but the dubious light admitted through windows, scarce visible between the rows of statues which crown the entablature, sunk me into fits of gloom and sadness.
Monasteries and cathedrals were certain to perish sooner or later, for the lead of every such roof except Coldingham had been stripped and sold by 1585, while tombs had been desecrated for their poor spoils, and the fanes were afterwards used as quarries of hewn stone.
The air was filled with the murmurs of water, trickling down basins of porphyry, and losing itself amongst overgrown weeds and grasses. Above the wood and between its boughs appeared several domes, and a strange lofty tower. I will not say they belong to St. Maria Maggiore; no, they are fanes and porticos dedicated to Cybele, who delights in sylvan situations.
She has shifted her milieu somewhat it began with the influx of Ruthven's friends from the 'yellow' section of the younger married set the Orchils, Fanes, Minsters, and Delmour-Carnes. Which is all right if she'd stay there. But in town you're likely to encounter anybody where the somebodies of one set merge into the somebodies of another.
Little thought those weeping women, that stricken disciple, that heart-broken mother, how on some future day that cross emblem to them of deepest infamy should blaze in the eye of all nations, symbol of triumph and hope, glittering on gorgeous fanes, embroidered on regal banners, associated with all that is revered and powerful on earth.
Before them, in clear view, rose the tall tower of the Pharos, the lighthouse of Alexandria, and beyond it, on the low-lying mainland, rose in splendid relief against the cloudless sky the glittering piles and fanes of the city of the Ptolemies. It was a magnificent picture, a "picture" because the colours everywhere were as bright as though laid on freshly by a painter's brush.
In these old aisles one walks, and the snake glides away on the pavement, and the bat flutters in the high pulpit, whilst moss and ivy tenderly enshroud the lonely walls; and over all is written the word DESOLATION. Symbol it is of the desolation which caused it, even the trampled fanes and altars of the human soul, the temple of God, whose profanation the church has suffered to go on unrebuked, till now both must crumble into the same grave.
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