The personal lot of this proud heart was not an easy one; homelessness broke him down, and the bitterness of eating others’ bread. Too well had he learned of the world and all its changing ways, and how poor becomes the soul that follows them. Mortality is a trite sorrow; there are worse: “We all complain that the old die and pass away; rather let us lament taints of another hue, that troth and seemliness and honour are dead.”[30] At the last Walther’s grey memory of life and his vainly yearning hope took form in a great elegy. After long years he seemed, with heavy steps, and leaning on his wanderer’s staff, to be returning to a home which was changed forever: “Alas! whither are they vanished, my many years! Did I dream my life, or is it real? what I once deemed it, was it that? And now I wake, and all the things and people once familiar, strange! My playmates, dull and old! And the fields changed; only that the streams still flow as then they flowed, my heart would break with thinking on the glad days, vanished in the sea. And the young people! slow and mirthless! and the knights go clad as peasants! Ah! Rome! thy ban! Our groans have stilled the song of birds. Fool I, to speak and so despair,--and the earth looks fair! Up knights again: your swords, your armour! would to God I might fare with your victor band, and gain my pay too--not in lands of earth! Oh! might I win the eternal crown from that sweet voyage beyond the sea, then would I sing O joy! and never more, alas--never more, alas.”[31] BOOK V SYMBOLISM CHAPTER XXVII SCRIPTURAL ALLEGORIES IN THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES; HONORIUS OF AUTUN Words, pictures, and other vehicles of expression are symbols of whatever they are intended to designate. A certain unavoidable symbolism also inheres in human mental processes; for the mind in knowing “turns itself to images,” as Aquinas says following Aristotle; and every statement or formulation is a casting together of data in some presentable and representative form. An example is the Apostles’ Creed, called also by this very name of Symbol, being a casting together, an elementary formula, of the essentials of the Christian Faith. In the same sense the “law of gravitation” or a moral precept is a deduction, induction, or gathering together into a representative symbol, of otherwise unassembled and uncorrelated experience. In the present and following chapters, however, the term symbol will be used in its common acceptation to indicate a thing, an act, or a word invested with an adventitious representative significance. All statements or expressions (through language or by means of pictures) which are intended to carry, besides their palpable meaning, another which is veiled and more spiritual, are symbolical or figurative, and more specifically are called allegories.[32]