efore the vision every moment. And they
were all preoccupied; they nearly all bore the weary, egotistic melancholy
that spreads like an infection at the close of a fete day in London; the
lights of a motor-omnibus would show the rapt faces of sixteen souls at
once in their glass cage, driving the vehicle on by their desires. The
policeman and the loafers in the ring of fire made by the public-houses at
the cross-roads--even these were grave with the universal affliction of
life, and grim with the relentless universal egotism. Lovers walked as
though there were no heaven and no earth, but only themselves in space.
Nobody but me seemed to guess that the road to Delhi could be as naught to
this road, with its dark, fleeing shapes, its shifting beams, its black
brick precipices, and its thousand pale, flitting faces of a gloomy and
decadent race. As says the Indian proverb, I met ten thousand men on the
Putney High Street, and they were all my brothers. But I alone was aware
of it. As I stood watching autobus after autobus swing round in a fearful
semi-circle to begin a new journey, I gazed myself into a mystic
comprehension of the significance of what I saw. A few yards beyond where
the autobuses turned was a certain house with lighted upper windows, and
in that house the greatest lyric versifier that England ever had, and one
of the great poets of the whole world and of all the ages, was dying: a
name immortal. But nobody looked; nobody seemed to care; I doubt if any
one thought of it. This enormous negligence appeared to me to be fine, to
be magnificently human.

* * * * *

The next day all the shops were open, and hundreds of fatigued assistants
were pouring out their exhaustless patience on thousands of urgent and
bright women; and flags waved on high, and the gutters were banked with
yellow and white flowers, and the air was brisk and the roadways were
clean. The very vital spirit of energy seemed to have scattered the breath
of life generously, so that all were intoxicated by it in the gay
sunshine. He was dead then. The waving posters said it. When Tennyson died
I felt less hurt; for I had serious charges to bring against Tennyson,
which impaired my affection for him. But I was more shocked. When Tennyson
died, everybody knew it, and imaginatively realized it. Everybody was
touched. I was saddened then as much by the contagion of a general grief
as by a sorrow of my own. But there was