The sight of these interesting objects is suggestive of important reflections. Imagining oneself left alone in the vast building—permitted to tread in silence the deserted halls—what musings might arise relative to themes awfully beautiful, which the giddy portion of the daily crowd within the walls have never entertained!
This repository of art, with all its varied contents, is the production of the human mind. Its constructive skill is singularly exhibited in the edifice itself; not such constructive skill as can be confounded with the instinct of the bird or bee, not a blind impulsive power; but a clear-eyed intelligence, which can survey, and consider, and contrive, and adapt, and fashion, according to the exigency of the case, in ways more various than art can classify. Of the power of human discovery, the detection of latent qualities in nature, a remarkable example is afforded in the history of the material out of which the building itself is chiefly wrought.—That the vitrification of sand and nitrium, noticed accidentally by the Phœnician mariners, according to the once generally received account by Pliny; or that some other occurrence at a much earlier period, as is now commonly believed, should have led men to perceive, in materials perfectly opaque, capabilities of transformation into a substance perfectly transparent; that out of dingy masses of mineral could be spread forth sheets of liquid diamonds, broad as the awning over the Coliseum at Rome; that it was possible to mould this brittle material, as if it were so much wax or clay; that, hard as rock, it might be blown into a bubble soft and light as a drop of water; that, white as the sunbeam, it could receive and retain all the dyes of the rainbow; constitute a series of marvels, forming but one out of a thousand chapters included in the annals of human discovery. The plastic power of the human mind is also here displayed in the almost infinitely diversified forms which, under its touch, the rude materials of nature have received. Timber and stone, cut into elegant shapes for useful purposes, or with astonishing truthfulness made to resemble the most delicate expressions of animated nature, even to the feather of a bird and the petal of a flower! Earth moulded by hand or machinery, and metals wrought or cast in a thousand mimic fashions!