and strictly private manner,” should be strictly adhered to, as it was.
At midday on the fourteenth of June a few friends and ourselves saw our dear one laid to rest in the grand old cathedral. Our small group in that vast edifice seemed to make the beautiful words of our beautiful burial service even more than usually solemn and touching. Later in the day, and for many following days, hundreds of mourners flocked to the open grave, and filled the deep vault with flowers. And even after it was closed Dean Stanley wrote: “There was a constant pressure to the spot and many flowers were strewn upon it by unknown hands, many tears shed from unknown eyes.”
And every year on the ninth of June and on Christmas day we find other flowers strewn by other unknown hands on that spot so sacred to us, as to all who knew and loved him. And every year beautiful bright-coloured leaves are sent to us from across
the Atlantic, to be placed with our own flowers on that dear grave; and it is twenty-six years now since my father died!
And for his epitaph what better than my father’s own words:
“Of the loved, revered and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, nor make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous and true, the heart brave, warm and tender, and the pulse a man’s. Strike! shadow, strike! and see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.”
the end.
