"Is it really on the earth,
This miraculous dome of God?
Has the angel's measuring-rod
Which numbered cubits, gem from gem,
'Twixt the gates of the new Jerusalem,
Meted it out,—and what he meted,
Have the sons of men completed?
—Binding ever as he bade,
Columns in the colonnade,
With arms wide open to embrace
The entry of the human race?">[
[pk] [{441}] Lo Christ's great dome——.—[MS.M.]
[521] [The ruins which Byron and Hobhouse explored, March 25, 1810 (Travels in Albania, ii. 68-71), were not the ruins of the second Temple of Artemis, the sixth wonder of the world (vide Philo Byzantius, De Septem Orbis Miraculis), but, probably, those of "the great gymnasium near the port of the city." In 1810, and for long afterwards, the remains of the temple were buried under twenty feet of earth, and it was not till 1870 that the late Mr. J. T. Wood, the agent of the Trustees of the British Museum, had so far completed his excavations as to discover the foundations of the building on the exact spot which had been pointed out by Guhl in 1843. Fragments of the famous sculptured columns, thirty-six in number, says Pliny (Hist. Nat., xxxvi. 95), were also brought to light, and are now in the British Museum. (See Modern Discoveries on the Site of Ancient Ephesus, by J. T. Wood, 1890; Hist. of Greek Sculpture, by A. S. Murray, ii. 304.)]
[522] [Compare Don Juan, Canto IX. stanza xxvii. line 2—"I have heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl.">[
[pl] [{442}] ——round roofs swell.—[MS. M., D.]
[pm] Their glittering breastplate in the sun——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[523] [Compare Canto II. stanza lxxix. lines 2, 3—
"Oh Stamboul! once the Empress of their reign,
Though turbans now pollute Sophia's shrine.">[
[524] [The emphasis is on the word "fit." The measure of "fitness" is the entirety of the enshrinement or embodiment of the mortal aspiration to put on immortality. The vastness and the sacredness of St. Peter's make for and effect this embodiment. So, too, the living temple "so defined," great with the greatness of holiness, may become the enshrinement and the embodiment of the Spirit of God.]