Her component peoples have merged and have remerged. Her particular, famous cities have fallen down. Her soldiers have believed the world to have lost all, because a battle turned against them, Hittin or Leipsic. Her best has at times grown poor, and her worst rich. Her colonies have seemed dangerous for a moment from the insolence of their power, and then again (for a moment) from the contamination of their decline. She has suffered invasion of every sort; the East has wounded her in arms and has corrupted her with ideas; her vigorous blood has healed the wounds at once, and her permanent sanity has turned such corruptions into innocuous follies. She will certainly remain.
So that old room, by its very age, reminded me, not of decay, but of unchangeable things.
All this came to me out of the fire; and upon such a scene passed the pageantry of our astounding history. The armies marching perpetually, the guns and ring of bronze; I heard the chant of our prayers; and, though so great a host went by from the Baltic to the passes of the Pyrenees, the myriads were contained in one figure common to them all.
I was refreshed, as though by the resurrection of something loved and thought dead. I was no longer afraid of Time.
That night I slept ten hours. Next day, as I swung out into the air, I knew that whatever Power comforts men had thrown wide open the gates of morning; and a gale sang strong and clean across that pale blue sky which mountains have for a neighbour.
I could see the further valley broadening among woods, to the warmer places; and I went down beside the River Red-cap onwards, whither it pleased me to go.