How reverently we approach them, with what hesitation and misgiving we
try to express what we feel about them! They are indeed the sanctuaries
of England, sanctuaries in which it is wiser to pray than to exult,
since their beauty and antiquity, their repose and quietness, fill us
with an extraordinary uneasiness and amazement, a kind of nostalgia
which nothing really our own can satisfy. For if Winchester appeals to
us as the symbol of England, it is not the England of our day for which
she stands. Let Manchester or Sheffield stand for that, places so
unquiet, so meanly wretched and hopeless, that no one has ever thought
of them without a kind of fear and misery. Alas, they are the reality,
while Winchester gradually fades year by year into a mere dream city,
as it were Camelot indeed, too good to be true, established, if at all,
rather in the clouds, or in our hearts, than upon the earth we tread.
And if in truth she stands for something that was once our own, it is
for something we are gradually leaving behind us, discarding and
forgetting, something that after four centuries of disputation and
anarchy no man any longer believes capable of realisation here and now.
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