There was no pomp of organized mourning, and the ceremony was of the shortest and simplest. Among associates and followers of later years were the few survivors of that remarkable fellowship which had founded the Oxford Brotherhood and the Firm of Red Lion Square; and at the head of the grave Sir Edward Burne-Jones, the closest and the first friend of all, stood and saw a great part of his own life lowered into earth. "What I should do, or how I should get on without him," he had once said when Morris's increasing weakness became alarming, "I don't in the least know. I should be like a man who has lost his back." Si unus ceciderit, ab altero fulcietur: væ soli! quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se.[1]
As dusk fell, the storm swept more fiercely over Oxford. The driving rain found its way through the roof of the Union Library, and carried away patches of the faded painting with which, in the ardour of his first devotion to art, amid an unbroken band of kindred spirits, confident in youth, united in faith and friendship, he had adorned it thirty-nine years before. A new age had since then risen over a new England, and those early days were already receding into the dimness of an almost fabulous past.
Principes mortales, rem publicam æternam esse: proin repeterent sollennia:[2] the cold and august words of the Roman Emperor may best express the feeling with which that funeral company dispersed to their homes. A great personality had ceased: yet the strongest feeling in the minds of the survivors was rather that it had returned to, than, in the customary phrase of common usage, passed away from earth. Among the men and women through whom he had so often moved as in a dream, isolated, self-centred, almost empty of love or hatred, he moved no more. It seemed natural that
- ↑ Eclesiastes 4:10: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. (Wikisource-Ed.)
- ↑ Tacitus, Annals, book 3, ch. 6: Princes were mortal; the State was everlasting. Let them then return to their usual pursuits. (Wikisource-Ed.)
