The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more, and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them . . . The poetry of history lies in this quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.”
Quoted in Cannadine, G.M. Trevelyan, pp. 75, 196.
