140 THE INSPIRATIONS OF HISTORIANS
dreamer was back again in the every-day cockney world which was his
native social milieu and of which the Edwardian station wall was a
characteristic period piece.

A sense of personal communion with all men and women at all times
and places, which outranges the gamut of an historian's prose, is articu-
late in a poem which was already familiar and dear to the writer of this
Study at the time when that ineffable experience travelled through him.

Men laughed in Ancient Egypt, long ago,
And laughed beside the Lake of Galilee,
And my glad heart rejoices more to know,
When it leaps up in exultation too,
That, though the laugher and the laugh be new,
The joy is old as is the ancient sea.

Men wept in noble Athens, so they say,

And in great Babylon of many towers,

For the same sorrows that we feel to-day;

So, stranded high upon Time's latest peak,

I can with Babylonian and with Greek

Claim kinship through this common grief of ours.

The same fair moon I look upon to-night,
This shining golden moon above the sea,
Imparts a richer and more sweet delight
For all the eyes it did rejoice of old,
For all the hearts, long centuries grown cold,
That shared this joy which now it gives to me.

Whate'er I feel I cannot feel alone.

When I am happiest or most forlorn,

Uncounted friends whom I have never known

Rejoicing stand or grieving at my side,

These nameless, faceless friends of mine who died

A thousand years or more e'er I was born.1

'Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud
of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so
easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us/2
The runner has not yet reached his goal; for the experience, which only
poetry can convey, of the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace3 is the
revelation of a fellowship which is not the work of men4 but is an act of
God; and God's presence and participation transfigure a precarious
Brotherhood of Man into a Communion of Saints hi which God's
creatures are united with one another through their union with their
Creator.5

Quae fessis requies, quae merces fortibus,

Cum erit omnia Deus in omnibus I6

1 Rosalind Murray. 2 Hebrews xii. i.

3 Ejjh. iy. 3. 4 Acts v. 38.

s Saint Augustine: De Civitate Dei, Book XIX, chaps, 13,17, and 20, quoted in V, vi.
166 and in V. vi. 367.
6 Abelard: O gucmta quaUa. sunt ilia sabbata. „.