ck into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.

"In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us,
and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among
the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent
figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float
before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps
in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval
age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."

The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms
perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal
sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea
forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they

"Begin and cease, and then again begin
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the AEgean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery."

So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees,
and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have
fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our
own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming
and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the
millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.

Your loving old
G.P.

30

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of
them,--he wrote excellent English prose.

It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and
thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a
mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless,
unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the
language of the mass of the world."

The chief note of all his teaching was urb