Yet it was no less than this, and, thence onward, we see the England, that had been on the world's edge, looking toward the New World, and perceiving, {xxii} by right of its position and history, a wider destiny opening overseas. Fighting more stubbornly than ever against every attempt to make it an appanage of Europe, the eyes of England began to turn more and more constantly to those just-discovered realms with their incalculable future. In the imagination of the Celt, the organizing power of the Roman, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Norman, and in the sea-lore of them all, it seemed that Fate had been slowly forging a new instrument for the new task. It was only the realization of it that was to seek in the composite race that had thus been built up; and it is not too much to say, perhaps, that the loss of Calais was the right-about-turn that brought this about. Not Europe but the West was the new watchword. But the corollary to that was a new conception of the sea. It was no longer the means of defense, insulating Britain from her foes. It was the highway of her full and peculiar national expression. As never before and not often perhaps since, the sense of what admiralty meant flooded through the nation; and though, as in all the enterprises of human society, the motives in this one were no doubt mixed--though the desire for gold and the lust of fighting for fighting's sake were dominant in the minds of many of those sailors--it is equally clear that, for the best and finest of them, the idea of admiralty had a definite spiritual meaning. As we gather from their letters and records, they had begun to realize in themselves the upholders and missionaries of a nobler life. They were in true succession to the best of those Norman knights, whose {xxiii} spiritual contribution to England they had inherited; and, in admiralty, as they dreamed of it, we may trace the reincarnation, with a fuller and wider outlook, of that older chivalry.