"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up; old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk back 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 mediæval 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 Ægean, 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.