* * * * *
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 no general grief on Saturday.
Swinburne had written for fifty years, and never once moved the nation,
save inimically, when "Poems and Ballads" came near to being burnt
publicly by the hangman. (By "the nation," I mean newspaper readers. The
real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in
one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R.
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