to know, and all must be got by heart, for all is a
part of us and of that mighty fruitful and abiding past out of which
we are come, which alone we may really love, and which holds for ever
safe for us our origins.

After all, we live a very little time, the future is not ours, we hold
the present but by a brittle thread; it is the past that is in our
hearts. And so it is that to go afoot through Southern England is not
less than to appeal to something greater and wiser than ourselves, out
of which we are come, to return to our origins, to appeal to history,
to the divine history of the soul of a people.

There is a _genius loci_. To look on the landscapes we have always
known, to tread in the footsteps of our fathers, to follow the Legions
down the long roads, to trudge by the same paths to the same goal as
the pilgrims, to consider the silence of the old, old battlefields, to
pray in forgotten holy places to almost forgotten deities, is to be
made partakers of a life larger and more wonderful than that of the
individual, is to be made one with England. For in the quietness of
those ancient countrysides was England made by the men who begat us.
And even as a man of the Old Faith when he enters one of his
sanctuaries suddenly steps out of England into a larger world, a
universal country; so we in the earthwork by Thannington or the Close
of Canterbury, or upon the hill where Battle Abbey stood, surely have
something added to us by the genius of the place, indeed pass out of
ourselves into that which is England, a splendour and a holiness
beyond ourselves, which cannot die.

It is in such places we may best face reality, for they lend to
history all its poetry and, as Aristotle knew, there is more truth in
poetry than in history. And this, at least to-day, is perhaps the real
value and delight of our churches; I mean those great sanctuaries we
call Cathedrals which stand about England like half-dismantled castles
and remind us more poignantly than any other thing of all we are fain
to forget. There are the indelible words of our history most clearly
written. Consider the bricks of S. Martin's, the rude stones of the
little church of Bradford, the mighty Norman work of Romsey, the Early
English happiness of Salisbury, the riches and security of the long
nave of Winchester. Do we not there see the truth; can stones lie or
an answer be demanded of them according to folly? And if a man would
know the truth, let us say,