Page 146 - erewhon

gave me an impression of great peace and plenty.
Indeed it had been no error to say that this building was
one that appealed to the imagination; it did more—it car-
ried both imagination and judgement by storm. It was an
epic in stone and marble, and so powerful was the effect it
produced on me, that as I beheld it I was charmed and melt-
ed. I felt more conscious of the existence of a remote past.
One knows of this always, but the knowledge is never so
living as in the actual presence of some witness to the life of
bygone ages. I felt how short a space of human life was the
period of our own existence. I was more impressed with my
own littleness, and much more inclinable to believe that the
people whose sense of the fitness of things was equal to the
upraising of so serene a handiwork, were hardly likely to be
wrong in the conclusions they might come to upon any sub-
ject. My feeling certainly was that the currency of this bank
must be the right one.
We crossed the sward and entered the building. If the
outside had been impressive the inside was even more so. It
was very lofty and divided into several parts by walls which
rested upon massive pillars; the windows were filled with
stained glass descriptive of the principal commercial inci-
dents of the bank for many ages. In a remote part of the
building there were men and boys singing; this was the
only disturbing feature, for as the gamut was still unknown,
there was no music in the country which could be agreeable
to a European ear. The singers seemed to have derived their
inspirations from the songs of birds and the wailing of the
wind, which last they tried to imitate in melancholy cadenc-

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