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 artisans 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 hands 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."*