Self-expression is yet unknown as a concept; but 
“bringeth to light the fruits of our labors” is an excellent 
indication of the matrix from which the concept will be 
extracted much later. “Doth immortalize the monument of our 
spirits” renders perfectly the sixteenth-century idea of an 
immortality won through toil and mechanical repetition of that 
toil. In our own century the idea of such immortality has taken 
on a wry quality that is caught by Joyce in Ulysses  (p. 41):

     “When one reads these strange pages of one long 
     gone, one feels that one is at one with one who once . . .
          The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His 
     boots trod again a damp crackling mast, razorshells, 
     squeaking pebbles, that on the unnumbered pebbles 
     beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada. 
     Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles,