Explore "Segesta" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
High in the secret places of the hills / Cliff-girt it stands, in grassy solitude, / No ruin but a vision unachieved.
This temple is a house not made with hands / But born of man's incorrigible need / For permanence and beauty in the scud / And wreckage of mortality-as though / Great thoughts, communing in the noise of towns / With inward isolation and deep peace, / And dreams gold-paven for celestial feet, / Had wrought the sudden wonder; and behold, / The sky, the hills, the awful colonnade, / And, night-long woven through the fane's august / Intercolumniations, all the stars / Processionally wheeling- / Then it was / That, having reared their wonder, it would seem / The makers feared their God might prove less great / Than man's heart dreaming on him-and so left / The shafts unroofed, untenanted the shrine.