SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
The supreme moment came; the great captain, never greater than in death, stretched out his palsied hands. The deathman hesitated. "What dost thou fear, man? Strike, strike." One blow—a true one—and the murder was done. There were those standing near who saw his face as it had been the face of an angel. Courtier, historian, poet, seaman, soldier, his was "the noblest head that ever rolled into English dust."
The wasted body was laid under the altar of St. Margaret's, the church of the House of Commons, across the way from Westminster, with only a small tablet to mark his resting-place.
Sweet Bess, who shared his glory and his prison-house, and with little Wat had walked the terrace with him, does not lie beside him. I do not know where that fond and faithful heart went to dust, but I do believe that in the final day, for which all other days are made, true love will find its own, and they will be reunited for evermore.
I saw no monument to Raleigh in Westminster Abbey. The fame of the colonizer of Virginia belongs to us of the New World, and in 1880 a memorial window was placed there at the expense of Americans in London. Canon Farrar's address at the unveiling was a brilliant review of Raleigh's life and varied fortunes in the most glorious portion of the Elizabethan era. It concluded with an earnest appeal to the England of Queen Victoria and the America of Lincoln and of Garfield to stand shoulder to shoulder under the banner of the cross.