Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/356

340 CRITICAL STUDIES Sometimes I contemplate this huge ambitious edi- fice of the Swedenborgian doctrine of Correspond- ence, compiled grade above grade in series and order and degrees, and growing ever thinner as it ascends toward the culmination of a vanishing-point, as a gloomy pyramid in a vast desert, reared through- out long years by the kiUing toil of a multitudinous slavery ; wasted learning, scourged ingenuity making bricks without straw, fettered science, maimed and mutilated genius, starved humanities — and all to what end ? To be the tomb of death and oblivion, not the home of life and remembrance ; to be the silent and solitary sepulchre of its royal rearer, wherein he shall lie deep hidden, thick-swathed, made mummy, prisoned in the heavy sarcophagus, which for him is also a psychophagus : a desolate pyramid slowly crumbling away in the desolate desert, the sternest mockery of a monument, an enormous heap of blocks so enormous that it will not even repay quarrying for materials for homely structures of living use ; visited now and then as a mere curiosity by idle and vagrant sightseers, explored rarely by intrepid explorers, who risk their own lives in the exploration ; and when at length some Belzoni-Wilkinson plucks out the very heart of its mystery, he but disinters a musty eventerated corpse, which, if it does not wither into dust at the breath of the vital natural air, will be consigned to some museum to be stared at by the multitude with rather less of intelligent interest than is excited by its neighbour, the stuffed chimpanzee. Vanity of vanities ! all is vanity ! When an ephemeris shall reveal to its kind the genesis, history, nature, meaning, purpose, and future destiny of every tree, and plant, and