on, while all around
the massive silence rang with the last mist-music of his dying ears.

He was buried from St. Michael's on September 5, 1912, with the acclaim
of kings and music masters and little children and to the majestic
melody of his own music. The tributes that followed him to his grave
were unusually hearty and sincere. The head of the Royal College calls
the first production of "Hiawatha" one of the most remarkable events in
modern English musical history and the trilogy one of the most
universally-beloved works of modern English music. One critic calls
Taylor's a name "which with that of Elgar represented the nation's most
individual output" and calls his "Atonement" "perhaps the finest passion
music of modern times." Another critic speaks of his originality:
"Though surrounded by the influences that are at work in Europe today,
he retained his individuality to the end, developing his style, however,
and evincing new ideas in each succeeding work. His untimely death at
the age of thirty-seven, a short life--like those of Schubert,
Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Hugo Wolf--has robbed the world of one of its
noblest singers, one of those few men of modern times who found
expression in the language of musical song, a lyricist of power and
worth."

But the tributes did not rest with the artist; with peculiar unanimity
they sought his "sterling character," "the good husband and father," the
"staunch and loyal friend." And perhaps I cannot better end these
hesitating words than with that tribute from one who called this master,
friend, and whose lament cried in the night with more of depth and
passion than Alfred Noyes is wont in his self-repression to voice:

"Through him, his race, a moment, lifted up
Forests of hands to beauty, as in prayer,
Touched through his lips the sacramental cup
And then sank back, benumbed in our bleak air."

Yet, consider: to many millions of people this man was all wrong.
_First_, he ought never to have been born, for he was the mulatto son of
a white woman. _Secondly_, he should never have been educated as a
musician,--he should have been trained, for his "place" in the world and
to make him satisfied therewith. _Thirdly_, he should not have married
the woman he loved and who loved him, for she was white and the niece of
an Oxford professor. _Fourthly_, the children of such a union--but why
proceed? You know it all by heart.

If he had been black, like Paul Laur