We grieve for the loss of our beloved Monarch because it is a most personal loss,--one which is irreparable, and which will tell on the English Empire for many years to come. But we do not grieve for her _death_, because we know, not only through the Christian faith, but also through the wondrous workings of Science and its recent heaven-sent discoveries, that there is no such thing as Death. We know that when the soul is ready for Heaven the body drops from that radiant Essence like the husk from ripe corn, and sets it free to an eternity of endless joy, work and wisdom; and we are beginning to learn that all our trials and difficulties in this world, be they the trials and difficulties of an exalted position or an humble one, are but the necessary preparation for this divinely-ordained consummation. The Queen, our Mother and our Friend, lived her life with a noble simplicity commanding the admiration of the world. She accepted her many bereavements with a patience and dignity which silently expressed to all who cared to note it the purity of her faith in God. Occupying the proudest position on earth, her days were passed in the quietest pleasures,--and she stood before us, a daily unmatched example of the inestimable value of Home and home-life, with all its peaceful surroundings and sacred influences. There was nothing her Majesty so greatly disliked as vulgar show and ostentation; nothing she appreciated so thoroughly as quiet and decorous conduct, simplicity in dress, gentleness of manner. The extravagance, loose morals, and offensive assertion of flaunting wealth so common to London society nowadays, met with her extreme disapproval, and such faults of modern taste have often been set forth as the reasons why she so seldom visited the Metropolis. She was an incarnation of womanhood at its best; as a girl she is described by the chroniclers of the time as being simple and modest, unaffected and graceful; as a wife and mother she was devoted to her duties, and adored her husband and children; as a widow, no more faithful worshipper of a beloved memory has ever been writ down in our annals. As in our old legends the mythical King Arthur was called “the blameless King,” so perchance, in the far ages to come, when we, and all our progress, advancement, Imperialism and power shall have disappeared into the infinite, leaving only a faint echo, like the sound of a breaking wave upon the shore, future generations may know Victoria as “the blameless Queen,” in whose long reign England’s glory rose upward to an almost falling height! And now we stand, sorrow-stricken, even as the Queen’s own Laureate, Tennyson, wrote of his ‘Sir Bedivere,’-- “The stillness of the dead world’s winter dawn Amazed him, and he groan’d, ‘The King is gone!’ And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, ‘From the great deep to the great deep he goes!’”