He had taken off the heavy coat he wore; shorn of its bulk, he seemed extremely young, boyish, child-like even. There was something of childhood in the hidden, secret happiness of his eyes; something of childhood in the furtive way he fingered the column at whose base he stood, then quickly withdrew his hand. As one touches a flower, his gaze fondled the dim Abbey. Presently he moved slowly down the splendid nave, pausing now and then to drink in with thirsty eyes the beauty about him.... In a distant chapel, candles like captive fireflies were flickering amid the gloom of drooping banners, and the furled flags of forgotten wars.... The vastness of Westminster, the stateliness, lifted him as wings lift. It had always been so; throughout his childhood the Abbey had held for him the beauty and romance that other boys find in sport, in girls, in love. He was remembering how often and often as a child he had brought lunch with him and spent whole days exploring the Abbey--its great naves and chapels, its crypts and tombs. And it was still the same. War had not changed the Abbey. The soldier now was standing before the chancel at the high altar, his face lifted to the rose window that glowed above it. And suddenly, like light, transcendent happiness was about him. War had not changed him either! The thought that was like light about him bore him in an ecstasy of thanksgiving to his knees. His prayer was incoherent; a feeling of infinite, lifted happiness: to have gone from college, physically untrained for war, psychologically unprepared, to have spent three years in the mud and blood,--and to have remained unchanged! War had not changed him. War was an interruption, a suspension, a holding of one’s breath ... the things for which he had lived--poetry and beauty still were first. Irrelevantly, and with an overwhelming longing, he remembered the casual eyes of men who dwell in peace; he remembered English lanes that call out to be trod; violets like music in the grass; the cloistral quality of libraries; that first faint tremble in the trees of spring; moonlight like snow upon the night.... And then, a tremendous symphony, the poems he had loved broke over him. For an interval he was breathless, remembering the unbearable beauty of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Chaucer, like a dayesie in the grass; the music of Milton; Shelley’s “luminous wings”; Wordsworth, “whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Poetry! English poetry! He felt abased and purified and lifted. In a sudden flash he re-beheld his England as the land of poets. Not of shopkeepers, sailors, empire-builders. But of poets--the winged voices of the race!