meaning the same lady; it was only a neat way they had of doubling up a
sentiment in those days!--
With tears inscribes this monumental stone,
That holds their ashes and expects her own!
and everybody, including Mr. Pope, thought it perfectly sweet at the
time. Then what does this degenerate widow do, after giving Mr. Pope
every reason to believe that she would fulfil his poetry?'
'She marries again,' I said.
'Quite right; she marries again. But you needn't try to impose upon
me, miss! To come to that conclusion you didn't require any previous
information whatever! She marries again, and you can't think how it
vexed Mr. Pope.'
'I know,' I said, 'he declared that was the last of his lending the
use of his genius to widows'--for I had to assume some knowledge of the
subject.
Miss Corke looked at me. 'You idjit!' she said. 'He did nothing of the
sort.'
'Michael Drayton!' I read amongst other names which surprised me by
their unfamiliarity; for in America, whatever Peter Corke may say, if we
have a strong point, it is names--'who was Michael Drayton? and why was
he entitled to a bust?'
'He wrote the "Polyolbion,"' said Miss Corke, as if that were all there
was to say about it.
'Do you know,' I said--'I am ashamed to confess it, but even of so
well-known and interesting a work of genius as the "Polyolbion" I have
committed very few pages to memory!'
'Oh!' returned Miss Peter, 'you're getting unbearable! There's a lovely
epitaph for you, of Edmund Spenser's, "whose divine spirrit needs noe
othir witnesse than the workes which he left behind him." You will
kindly make no ribald remarks about the spelling, as I perceive you are
thinking of doing. Try and remember that we taught you to spell over
there. And when Edmund Spenser was buried, dear damsel, there came a
company of poets to the funeral--Shakespeare, doubtless, among them--and
cast into his grave all manner of elegies.'
'Of their own composition?' I inquired.
'Stupid!--certainly! And the pens that wrote them!'
I said I thought it a most beautiful and poetic thing to have done, if
they kept no copies of the poems, and asked Miss Corke if she believed
anything of the kind would be possible now.
'Bless you!' she replied. 'In the first place, there aren't the poets;
in the second place, there isn't the hero-worship; in the third place,
the conditions of the poetry-market are different nowadays--it's more
expensive than it used to be; the poets would prefer to send wreaths
from the florist's--you can get quite a nice one for twelve-and-six;'
and Peter Corke made a little grimace expressive of disgust with the
times. 'We used to have all poets and no public, now we have all public
and no poets!' she declared, 'now that he is gone--and Tennyson can't
live for ever.' Miss Corke pointed with her parasol to a name in the
stone close to my right foot. I had been looking about me, and above me,
and everywhere but there. As I read it I took my foot away quickly, and
went two or three paces off. It was so unlooked-for, that name, so new
to its association with death, that I stood aside, held by a sudden
sense of intrusion. He had always been so high and so far off in the
privacy of his genius, so revered in his solitudes, so unapproachable,
that it took one's breath away for the moment to have walked
unthinkingly over the grave of Robert Browning. It seemed like taking an
advantage one would rather not have taken--even to stand aside and read
the plain, strong name in the floor, and know that he, having done with
life, had been brought there, and left where there could be no longer
about him any wonderings or any surmises. Miss Corke told me that she
knew him, 'as one can say one knows such a man,' and how kindly his
interest was in all that the ordinary people of his acquaintance like
herself were thinking and doing; but the little, homely stories she
related to me from her personal knowledge of him seemed curiously
without relevance then. Nothing mattered, except that he who had
epitomised greatness in his art for the century lay there beneath his
name in the place of greatness. And then, immediately, from this grave
of yesterday, there came to me light and definition for all the
graves of the day before. It stole among the quaint lettering of the
inscriptions, and into the dusty corners of the bas-reliefs, and behind
all the sculptured scrolls and laurels, and showed me what I had somehow
missed seeing sooner--all that shrined honour means in England; and just
in that one little corner how great her possessions are! Miss Corke said
something about the royal tombs and the coronation chair, and the wax
effigies in the chamber above the Islip Chapel, and getting on; but, I
if you don't mind,' I said, 'I should like to sit down here for a while
with the other Americans and think.'