History can only make her pictures and rebuild the past out of the things she can save from a shipwreck; she will piece together just so much of the battle of Agincourt as the sea washes up to the shores. The Memory of the world is not a bright, shining crystal, but a heap of broken fragments, a few fine flashes of light that break through the darkness. And so, history is full of tales half-told, and of tunes that break off in the middle; she gives us snatches from the lives of men, a peep at some corner of a battlefield, just enough to make us long for a fuller vision. All history is full of locked doors, and of faint glimpses of things that cannot be reached. The Middle Ages will kick a heel into the twentieth century, in a Fountains Abbey--in some straggling ruin--and will ask us to piece out its former, completed grandeur for ourselves and to people it with a life of our own imagining. History can seldom recover a given set of circumstances and make us see a definite situation, a particular knot of human action at a given place and a given time; if two diplomatists meet in a certain room to settle a problem, and afterwards describe their proceedings to their respective governments, or recall them in memoirs, if Napoleon meets Metternich in time of crisis at Prague, we can only recover a dim and faulty account of the interview from their conflicting descriptions; and yet this is one of the most precise and clear situations that a historian might wish to narrate. And when a Carlyle, in the middle of a rugged description of the taking of the Bastille, can break away to apostrophise, in a way that is sublime: Oh evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fell slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main.... he is doing something, he is catching the moment, in a way that can seldom be achieved in history, unless history brings in fiction to help her. History, then, fails the romanticist. Its shortcomings become apparent when we try to particularise, when say, we wish to see a definite picture. About the closest human things, history only tells us enough to set us guessing and wondering.