Lovers walked as though there were no heaven and no earth, but only themselves in space.  Nobody but me seemed to guess that the road to Delhi could be as naught to this road, with its dark, fleeing shapes, its shifting beams, its black brick precipices, and its thousand pale, flitting faces of a gloomy and decadent race.  As says the Indian proverb, I met ten thousand men on the Putney High Street, and they were all my brothers.  But I alone was aware of it.  As I stood watching autobus after autobus swing round in a fearful semi-circle to begin a new journey, I gazed myself into a mystic comprehension of the significance of what I saw.  A few yards beyond where the autobuses turned was a certain house with lighted upper windows, and in that house the greatest lyric versifier that England ever had, and one of the great poets of the whole world and of all the ages, was dying:  a name immortal.  But nobody looked; nobody seemed to care; I doubt if any one thought of it.  This enormous negligence appeared to me to be fine, to be magnificently human.

* * * * *

The next day all the shops were open, and hundreds of fatigued assistants were pouring out their exhaustless patience on thousands of urgent and bright women; and flags waved on high, and the gutters were banked with yellow and white flowers, and the air was brisk and the roadways were clean.  The very vital spirit of energy seemed to have scattered the breath of life generously, so that all were intoxicated by it in the gay sunshine.  He was dead then.  The waving posters said it.  When Tennyson died I felt less hurt; for I had serious charges to bring against Tennyson, which impaired my affection for him.  But I was more shocked.  When Tennyson died, everybody knew it, and imaginatively realized it.  Everybody was touched.  I was saddened then as much by the contagion of a general grief as by a sorrow of my own.  But there was no general grief on Saturday.  Swinburne had written for fifty years, and never once moved the nation, save inimically, when “Poems and Ballads” came near to being burnt publicly by the hangman. (By “the nation,” I mean newspaper readers.  The real nation, busy with the problem of eating, dying, and being born all in one room, has never heard of either Tennyson or Swinburne or George R. Sims.) There are poems of Tennyson, of Wordsworth, even of the speciously recondite Browning, that have entered into the general consciousness.  But nothing of Swinburne’s!  Swinburne had no moral ideas to impart.  Swinburne never publicly yearned to meet his Pilot face to face.  He never galloped on one of Lord George Sanger’s horses from Aix to Ghent.  He was interested only in ideal manifestations of beauty and force.  Except when he grieved the judicious by the expression of political crudities, he never connected art with any form of morals that the British public could understand.  He sang.  He sang supremely.  And it wasn’t enough for the British public.  The consequence was that his fame spread out as far as under-graduates, and the tiny mob of under-graduates was the largest mob that ever worried itself about Swinburne.  Their shouts showed the high-water mark of his popularity.  When one of them wrote in a facetious ecstasy over “Dolores,”