By the year 1912--so oddly do human things turn about in the short unit of one lifetime--his career, his verse, his rhetoric, his perpetual insistence, had become a sort of institution for the nation. Societies love to take those of an older generation and to make them symbols. Even his literary insufficiency was half forgiven, and men talked of him as a sort of curious relic from the days when war was possible, and when the glory of a national rehabilitation (now impossible) could be reasonably entertained. But with this position of his among his fellow-citizens (which was quaintly mixed up with the love we bear for ancient things, almost because they are odd, and largely because we are sure they can never return) there now went something of grandeur. He was now, they said, an old man; and his very insistence in harping upon so single and so unfertile a theme had given him his definite place. And just as men would say, “So and so is now our great poet, So and so our great actor, So and so this, and So and so that,” in the same way they pointed to the man now grown old and said, “He, of course, is our great patriot,” but they said it with a smile. One man, however, who loved him, called him “Tyrtæus”: quizzically enough, I think. No one thought it possible that his war would come. His illness grew upon him fast. By one of those accidents which show the lives of men to be ordered, as the parts of an actor are ordered upon the stage, this man died just in those days before the war, when it was far too late for any man to remember great wars in Western Europe as a reality, and still some weeks too early for men to have grown uneasy and to think they already heard the guns. But as though so simple, so direct, and so very great a life were a presage, his funeral made a great picture. There was a sort of silence after his death, like that which comes before a storm. Nor was the moment long delayed. Upon a certain day, memorable to all of us, the Cabinet of Berlin presented a brief note to the Government of Paris. Prussia would fight in the East, and demanded as a guarantee the frontier garrisons of the French, over and above a promise of neutrality. We know the reply, and we know what followed.