Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/63

 idea of perfecting a great work has been able to hold out long enough for the purpose of seeing that work completed. I am not now speaking of enterprises the completion of which was necessary to cover expenses. He that would know exactly what I mean should go and see Cologne Cathedral. Let him take full account of the grand conception of that building, in the soul of the architect, Gerhard Von Riehl of the faith in the hearts of the people that enabled him to begin and continue that work  of the influence of such ideas as required so colossal an expression to serve as the visible image of the unseen religious feeling  and let him compare this tremendous strain with the movement that a few centuries after gave birth to the moment in which the work was suspended

A deep chasm lies between Erwin Von Steinbach and our modern builders! I know, of course, that for years people have been trying to fill this chasm. In Cologne also they are again building at the Cathedral. But will they be able to re-connect the broken thread? Will one be able to find again in days, what  constituted the power of church dignitary and building-lord? I believe not. Money, no doubt, will be obtainable, and for money one may buy bricks and mortar. One may pay the artist who will submit a design, and the bricklayer who does the masonry. But not to be bought for money is the lost and yet venerable sentiment that in a building-scheme saw a poem, a poem in granite, that spoke loudly to the people, a poem in marble, that stood there as an immovable eternal prayer.

On the boundary, then, between Lebak and Pandeglang, there was one morning an unusual commotion. Hundreds of saddle-horses, and at least a thousand people—a good number for the place—walked up and down in busy expectation. Here one saw the heads of the villages, and the heads of the districts of Lebak, all with their retinues, and judging by the beautiful Arab crossbreed which, in his rich trappings, stood gnawing the silver snaffle, there was also present a head of higher rank. This indeed was the