The suspense was insupportable, the poignant crushing terror of it all, the incredible predicament of a nation bodily leaving its birth place, stunned the crowds, and in silence with a thousand varying episodes throughout its interminable acres, the populace stood, dumb as the unresponsive rock, apparently as apathetic as the herding cows. Then at sunfall the Dreadnought, followed by an escort of cruisers heavily churned the waters, and passed down the Thames, from its mouth into the Channel, and so on to the open sea, and with it went the concentrated expression of the Idea of the English empire--the King. How strangely immobile is Nature! A race which had covered its literary vestures with the garlands of poetry, wrought from the imagery in nature’s picture-book, which had spent its brain and industry in winning for nature new devotees, and new sacrifices of praises and idolatry, which had enthroned among its chiefest charms its surrender to the control of nature, in this hour of torturing doubt, disenthronement and eviction won no sign of recognition. The day closed brightly. The sun went down in a sky of unchecked splendor, and the moon-illuminated night bathed the ancient bastions of Tilbury with an argent sheen. The terrible event found no reflection in the august calmness and serenity of Nature. “Its withers were unwrung.” Enveloped in the processes of decay and change, the lapse of a kingdom was but a paltry contribution to the chronicle of destroyed continents, and shattered worlds. There was no contact between its mechanism and the obliteration of a sentiment, or an idea, or moral regime. Nothing short of a change in atmospheric pressure would bring tears to its face, or agony in its deportment. And what in any case was this desertion of a land, the removal of a people? It was subordinated to fluctuations of an oceanic river, to the up and down shiverings of the crust of the earth. It was a part of the huge drama part of the inlaid order of things, as determined at creation, when the ways and means of shaping the world, and all things in it, were inaugurated. Why should the disappearance of a condition shock a system of disappearances and appearances, which is another name for the unceasing orbit of revolutions in the face of the earth, and which is nature? An individual counts for nothing in the lapse of twenty-four hours gone or come. Why in the aeons gone and the aeons yet to come should the migration of a people, or the emptying of a vestige of the earth’s surface merit notice? And so the elements did not hasten to weep, or storm, or furiously proclaim their commiseration, and the whispering calls of the half revived summer from pond and wood and meadow retained their old time sweetness.