The Great Globe itself,
Yea all which it Inherit,
Shall Dissolve,
And like the baseless Fabrick of a Vision
Leave not a rack behind."
In St. Margaret's Church, hard by the Abbey on the north side, lies the decapitated body of another great Englishman of the Elizabethan era, Sir Walter Raleigh, whose History of the World contains a passage which expresses, as no other within my knowledge has done, the feeling that comes to a thoughtful man as he walks through this solemn burial place of genius and power: "O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two words, Hic jacet."
A sober autumn day, with the leaves changing and the atmosphere touched with melancholy suggestive of the passing of worldly glory, prepared us to feel the full force of Raleigh's sentiment, and, as we stepped through the doorway into the subdued light of the minster, and saw the multitude of white marble statues and tombs stretching through dim aisles and clustering in gloomy chapels, we were "hushed into noiseless reverence," and understood what Edmund Burke meant when he said, "The moment I entered Westminster Abbey, I felt a kind of awe pervade my mind which I cannot describe; the very silence seemed sacred."
POET'S CORNER, WESTMINSTER.