gondolas following the high flower-strewn funeral-barge
through the thronged water-ways and out across the lagoon to the
desolate Isle of the Dead: that London has rarely seen aught more solemn
than the fog-dusked Cathedral spaces, echoing at first with the slow
tramp of the pall-bearers, and then with the sweet aerial music swaying
upward the loved familiar words of the 'Lyric Voice' hushed so long
before. Yet the poet was as much honoured by those humble friends,
Lambeth artizans and a few poor working-women, who threw sprays of
laurel before the hearse--by that desolate, starving, woe-weary
gentleman, shivering in his threadbare clothes, who seemed transfixed
with a heart-wrung though silent emotion, ere he hurriedly drew from his
sleeve a large white chrysanthemum, and throwing it beneath the coffin
as it was lifted inward, disappeared in the crowd, which closed again
like the sea upon this lost wandering wave.

Who would not honour this mighty dead? All who could be present were
there, somewhere in the ancient Abbey. One of the greatest, loved and
admired by the dead poet, had already put the mourning of many into the
lofty dignity of his verse:--

"Now dumb is he who waked the world to speak,
And voiceless hangs the world beside his bier,
Our words are sobs, our cry of praise a tear:
We are the smitten mortal, we the weak.
We see a spirit on Earth's loftiest peak
Shine, and wing hence the way he makes more clear:
See a great Tree of Life that never sere
Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak:
Such ending is not Death: such living shows
What wide illumination brightness sheds
From one big heart--to conquer man's old foes:
The coward, and the tyrant, and the force
Of all those weedy monsters raising heads
When Song is murk from springs of turbid source."[27]

[Footnote 27: George Meredith.]

One word more of "light and fleeting shadow." In the greatness of his
nature he must be ranked with Milton, Defoe, and Scott. His very
shortcomings, such as they were, were never baneful growths, but mere
weeds, with a certain pleasant though pungent savour moreover, growing
upon a rich, an exuberant soil. Pluck one of the least lovely--rather
call it the unworthy arrow shot at the body of a dead comrade, so
innocent of ill intent: yet it too has a beauty of its own, for the
shaft was aflame from the fulness of a heart whose