It is
a truism to say of the wise and noble lady who is gone from us that we
shall always remember her; but there is a subtler and higher compliment
still in confessing that we often forgot her. We forgot her as we forget
the sunshine, as we forget the postulates of an argument, as we commonly
forget our own existence. Mr. Gladstone is the only figure whose loss
prepared us for such earthquakes altering the landscape. But Mr.
Gladstone seemed a fixed and stationary object in our age for the same
reason that one railway train looks stationary from another; because he
and the age of progress were both travelling at the same impetuous rate
of speed. In the end, indeed, it was probably the age that dropped
behind. For a symbol of the Queen's position we must rather recur to the
image of a stretch of scenery, in which she was as a mountain so huge
and familiar that its disappearance would make the landscape round our
own door seem like a land of strangers. She had an inspired genius for
the familiarising virtues; her sympathy and sanity made us feel at home
even in an age of revolutions. That indestructible sense of security
which for good and evil is so typical of our nation, that almost
scornful optimism which, in the matter of ourselves, cannot take peril
or even decadence seriously, reached by far its highest and healthiest
form in the sense that we were watched over by one so thoroughly English
in her silence and self-control, in her shrewd trustfulness and her
brilliant inaction.
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