Yes, another world it was, when these black ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiselling, first saw the sun as walls, long ago. Gauge not, with thy dilettante compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's—Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's—Houses, the Golgotha of true Souls departed!
1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “Ch. 2, St. Edmundsbury”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, book II (The Ancient Monk)