ill be there. It was that the weeds and wild
things had been everywhere breaking into our boundaries,
climbing over the northern wall or crawling through the eastern gate,
so that the city would soon have been swallowed in the jungle.
And whether the lines had been redrawn logically or loosely,
or particular things cleared with consistency or caprice, a line
has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow.
The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at least
capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics
of the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics
which even the war had never touched at all; I felt the change
as much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West.
I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look
at a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crape
and such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plain
pedestal nothing now is left but the single word "Strasbourg."
I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall
in a poor street in Brindisi; _Italia vittoriosa_. But I felt it
as much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote;
in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down
upon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophy
that had been raised, they were a palladium that had been rescued.
These were the things that had again been saved from chaos,
as they were saved at Salamis and Lepanto; and I knew what had
saved them or at least in what formation they had been saved.
I knew that these scattered splendours of antiquity would hardly
have descended to us at all, to be endangered or delivered,
if all that pagan world had not crystallised into Christendom.

Crossing seas as smooth as pavements inlaid with turquoise
and lapis lazuli, and relieved with marble mountains as clear
and famous as marble statues, it was easy to feel all that had
been pure and radiant even in the long evening of paganism;
but that did not make me forget what strong stars had comforted
the inevitable night. The historical moral was the same whether
these marble outlines were merely "the isles" seen afar off like
sunset clouds by the Hebrew prophets, or were felt indeed as Hellas,
the great archipelago of arts and arms praised by the Greek poets;
the historic heritage of both descended only to the Greek Fathers.
In those wild times and places, the thing that preserved bot