Sir Frederick Bridge is playing it now, as Robert Browning, all there is of him on earth, is carried on his bier through the dense throng, to pause a while at the foot of the chancel steps beneath the central lantern. Choir and clergy precede him. On either side of him walk Hallam Tennyson, Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, Archdean Farrar, Professor Masson, Professor Jowett (master of Balliol), Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray Smith (Browning's publisher), and Professor Knight (of the University of St. Andrews). Then as the service proceeds (the Archbishop of Canterbury is here, Dean Vaughan, and others eminent in the {54} Church) the choristers sing a "Meditation" which Sir Frederick Bridge has composed to Mrs. Browning's poem: "What would we give to our beloved? The hero's heart to be unmoved, The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep, The patriot's voice to teach and rouse, The monarch's crown to light the brows? 'He giveth His beloved sleep.' "O earth, so full of dreary noises! O men, with wailing in your voices! O delved gold, the wailers heap! O strife, O curse that o'er it fall! God strikes a silence through you all, And 'giveth His beloved sleep.' "His dews drop mutely on the hill, His cloud above it saileth still, Though on its slopes men sow and reap, More softly than the dew is shed, Or cloud is floated overhead, 'He giveth His beloved sleep.'" The organ and the choir paused; all sounds died away. God struck a silence through us all. It fell upon a throng that faced the world's loss as if suddenly confronted by the flight of the soul for whose absence all mourned. And just then there fell a shaft of sunlight, golden, magical, touching the bier, and then it faded slowly away. To many, very many among the silent company, the loss by this death was a personal one; to all it had more than a touch of that. It must be so when a great poet dies. What I remember as vividly as all else {55} was the great number of young faces in the Abbey, as if the rising generation did reverence to him who had passed.