"At all events," he cried in a cheery tone, "they'll be
appreciated in the British Museum--eh?"
"I hope so. They ought to be."
Then I fancied them immured somewhere in that vast necropolis of
dead gods, under the gloom of a pea-soup-fog, chambered with
forgotten divinities of Egypt or Babylon, and trembling faintly
at the roar of London,--all to what end? Perhaps to aid another
Alma Tadema to paint the beauty of another vanished civilization;
perhaps to assist the illustration of an English Dictionary of
Buddhism; perhaps to inspire some future laureate with a metaphor
startling as Tennyson's figure of the "oiled and curled Assyrian
bull." Assuredly they would not be preserved in vain. The
thinkers of a less conventional and selfish era would teach new
reverence for them. Each eidolon shaped by human faith remains
the shell of a truth eternally divine, and even the shell itself
may hold a ghostly power. The soft serenity, the passionless
tenderness, of these Buddha faces might yet give peace of soul to
a West weary of creeds transformed into conventions, eager for
the coming of another teacher to proclaim, "_I have the same
feeling for the high as for the low, for the moral as for the
immoral, for the depraved as for the virtuous, for those holding
sectarian views and false opinions as for those whose beliefs are
good and true_."
(1) A name given to fireproof storehouses in the open ports of
the Far East. The word is derived from the Malay gadong.