They rose to go to the homes which were their own, without a lord.  We exchanged the last salutations.  The wooden soles of their shoes clattered upon the stone threshold of the door.

The master also rose and left me.  I sat there for perhaps an hour, alone, with the falling fire before me and a vision in my heart.

Though I was here on the very roof and centre of the western land, I heard the surge of the inner and the roll of the outer sea; the foam broke against the Hebrides, and made a white margin to the cliffs of Holy Ireland.  The tide poured up beyond our islands to the darkness in the north.  I saw the German towns, and Lombardy, and the light on Rome.  And the great landscape I saw from the summit to which I was exalted was not of to-day only, but also of yesterday, and perhaps of to-morrow.

Our Europe cannot perish.  Her religion—­which is also mine—­has in it those victorious energies of defence which neither merchants nor philosophers can understand, and which are yet the prime condition of establishment.  Europe, though she must always repel attacks from within and from without, is always secure; the soul of her is a certain spirit, at once reasonable and chivalric.  And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

She will not dissolve by expansion, nor be broken by internal strains.  She will not suffer that loss of unity which would be for all her members death, and for her history and meaning and self an utter oblivion.  She will certainly remain.

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.