To the politician, the important movements and striking decisions and big crises that for him are “history,” are things within reach; the military man has not much difficulty in recovering the noisy things that for him are “history”; the diplomatist knows where to look for the story of international tangles, and the mysteries of pacts and treaties and the hidden sources of power in a state; court and camp and parliament house are rich with documents and records; the things that are played out in the limelight, the stately public events are, in a way, simple to the historian, and the men who talk of democracies and regiments and alliances, and who think of people in the mass and can find food in statistics and budgets--these can discuss the condition of England and the welfare of the people. But they are far from life. Now the “huts where poor men lie” elude the world’s Memory. The ploughman whom Gray saw, plodding his weary way, the rank and file of Monmouth’s rebel crowd--every man of them a world in himself, a mystery of personality, more wonderful than a star--the tavern-keepers whom Puritan England strove to root out--these have left no memorial and all that we know about them is just enough to set us guessing and wondering. The things by which we remember an old friend--his peculiar laugh, his way of drawing his hand through his hair, his whistle in the street, his humour, and the sound of his footstep on the stair--these things, at any rate, we cannot hope to recapture in history, any more than we can recapture last night’s sunset, or hear again a song sung by Jenny Lind. The most homely and intimate and personal things slip through the hands of the historian. The history that the romanticist in us longs for, the desire to touch the pulsing heart of men who toyed with the world as we do, and left it long ago, is the quest for the most elusive thing in the world. We who cannot know our own friends, save in a fragmentary way and at occasional moments of self-revelation, cannot hope to read the hearts of half-forgotten kings. We cannot hope to get close to the lives of humble men who trod silently through the world. These we cannot fasten upon at all; history is thwarted; Earth cannot remember.