The Cross had brought him light and healing, and at the foot of the
Cross he laid his gift of song.

It is a moot point whether the "Elene" or the "Dream of the Holy Rood"
came first. The poetry of the "Dream" is as fine as the conception is
grand, and, at whatever time it was written, it must be classed as being
at the high-water mark of the poet's work.

Wonderful things have been given to us "under the similitude of a
dream"; things beautiful and terrible, things wise and strange. There
have been Dreamers of Dreams into whose souls have sunk the sight and
the hearing of deep things, high things and precious, of comfort and of
warning, of sweetest help and of gravest and most earnest exhortation.

The speech of these Dreamers has sounded in our ears, and has left the
vibrations to go on and on for our lifetime: this we call remembering.

In English literature we have some great tellings "under the similitude
of a dream." We have the nineteenth-century "Dream of Gerontius," our
great Cardinal's drama of the soul in its parting and after. We have the
seventeenth-century dream from the darkness of Bedford Gaol, whence John
Bunyan saw the pilgrims on their way, through dangers and trials, on to
the river that must be crossed before they could come to the Celestial
City. We have the fourteenth-century dream of the gaunt, sad-souled
William Langley, the dreamer of the Malvern Hills. And, earlier by many
a century, we have the dream of the dreamer at the depth of midnight,
the midnight whose heart was bright with the splendour of the glorious
vesting and gem-adorning of the Cross of Jesus Christ, and dark with the
moisture of the Sacred Blood that oozed therefrom.