These various areas of life--ages of history, localities and circles of activity--may be viewed as being worlds in themselves and as having a life of their own; but that life only shows itself in its results, as for instance, in the prejudices and turns of thought and habits and peculiarities of speech of the members who make up the world. And just as a child learning to read at first spells out only letters, and consciously combines them into words and only gradually learns to see words as a whole and take them in at a glance--just as a learner in music at first only sees notes and has to use some effort in order to combine them into a chord, and only later comes to grasp a chord at sight--so the student of history at first sees only these isolated details and pieces of fact, and must gradually come to the point at which his mind can jump to a synthesis and see the one life that is the source of a variety of facts. The novelist consciously reproducing facts from history, copying its handwriting letter by letter, advancing by accumulation, and straining for a faithful presentation of details in the life of a people, can scarcely avoid betraying the mechanism with which he works; but the writer who has caught the principle that lies behind all these facts, and sees not merely men and actions and sayings, but a life underneath all these, has caught history at its source; he can throw down his scaffolding. Step by step he has followed facts and weighed his evidence and hung upon details, until there has flashed in upon him the something that gives light and meaning to them all, and changes them into a vision. The age of history is no longer to him a sum of information, but a world that has been won and appropriated. More facts and details that he may amass find their setting and significance, find a context in that world; they may also check, or change, or amplify his acceptance and appreciation of it; but to him, that age of history is a world in his mind, like a childhood’s scene half-remembered, and he may withdraw to it at will, retreading it in his thinking--crossing and recrossing, and playing upon it in his imagination, all the time recasting it in the process.