Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/58

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their destiny. They have each done their part in the evolution of civilization.

The building, as a completed whole, for whose construction centuries have labored, typifies the point where Nature stops and Art begins, where the primitive gives way to the modern. It marks an epoch in which all that has gone before belongs to a period of its own, and all that is to come will be but the development of that beginning. It stands for the transition stage in Western history, and is an epitome of all that man has done and may do with the forces of nature. It tells a silent but eloquent story of the blazed trail.