THE FOUNDATION OF THE CITY 97 



an eminence loftier than any we can attain for the contem- 

 plation of the destinies of man. We see before us, in minia- 

 ture, the large and simple lines that in our own dispropor- 

 tionate sphere we never have the occasion to disentangle and 

 follow to the end. Spirit and matter are there, the race and 

 the individual, evolution and permanence ; life and death, 

 the past and the future ; all gathered together in a retreat 

 that our hand can lift and one look of our eye embrace. 

 And may we not reasonably ask ourselves whether the mere 

 size of a body, and the room that it fills in time and space, 

 can modify to the extent we imagine the secret idea of nature ; 

 the idea that we try to discover in the little history of the 

 hive, which in a few days already is ancient, no less than in 

 the great history of man, of whom three generations overlap 

 a long century ? 



52 



Let us go on, then, with the story of our hive ; let us 

 take it up where we left it ; and raise, as high as we may, 

 a fold of the festooned curtain in whose midst a strange 

 sweat, white as snow and airier than the down of a wing, 

 is beginning to break over the swarm. For the wax that 

 is now being born is not like the wax that we know ; it is 

 immaculate, it has no weight ; seeming truly to be the soul 

 of the honey, that itself is the spirit of flowers. And this 

 motionless incantation has called it forth that it may serve 

 us, later — in memory of its origin, doubtless, wherein it is 

 one with the azure sky, and heavy with perfumes of magnifi- 

 cence and purity — as the fragrant light of the last of our altars. 



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