Marie Corelli

“ All manner of kindly thoughts have moved her spirit,—thoughts which have blossomed into kindliest actions, and the very sorrows she has suffered have seemed merely to increase her sweetness, if such a thing could be possible. It will be strange at first to think of her as Queen Alexandra, having known her always as Princess of Wales, but if queenly deeds can make queenliness, then she has been a queen all the time. ”

“ How many times in the history of the world has it been proved that Governments are paralyzed in a great national crisis, and powerless to avert a great national disaster! How often have the men composing the governing body lost their heads in emergency, and thrown aside their responsibilities in desperate dismay at the suddenly rising tide of difficulties, many of which they had not foreseen! But the Queen’s heart was true ”

“ At this particular moment when the great Timepiece of the Universe strikes away for us one era and rings in another, it is well for us that we should be brought to consider exactly where we stand in our national life, and to remember that England has just completed a thousand years of historical upward progress. ”

“ Thither she has gone, the great Mother of a great people; a people growing out like their own English oaks, far and wide, taking broad root, and spreading mighty branches in all lands,—just as her new Empire of the South has been affixed like another jewel to her crown, she has put off the earthly6 diadem and robes of earthly state and has “passed” into that higher condition of being, wherein all things that seemed sorrows become joys, and where eyes grown blind perchance with tears for lost and loved ones, suddenly see “not as in a glass darkly, but face to face.” ”

“ The Queen possessed the two supreme gifts with which God endows unspoilt women, Instinct and Tact. While men with heavy logic and contentious disputes wearily argued pros and cons of various deep questions, the Queen, bringing her quick brain to bear on the subject in hand, easily sprang to a straight issue, and by a word here, a gentle suggestion there, skilfully guided slower perceptions and duller wits out of darkness into light. ”

“ She must have noticed a complete departure from old ways and customs16 which, however simple they were, certainly did mark English women as the Queen-roses of the world, and did so influence men to love their homes and to work for the glory of their country that they were able to leave it greater than they found it. She must have watched Progress marching with swift, impetuous strides in one direction,—but Retrogression and Decay marching as steadily, though more slowly in another,—progress let us say in machinery, but retrogression in men. ”

“ East and West, North and South, the sword turns invincibly, and we can never pass it, save as Victoria, by the Grace of God, has passed it, across the dark river we call death. For ever we strive to be what we consider “happy,” and the majority of us strive in vain. ”

“ No one will deny that the Queen in the closing years of her long and splendid reign must have seen this reverence dying out and that her heart must often have been surcharged with weeping when she considered the great change that has come over modern thought and modern life since she first ascended the throne, a shy, pretty little girl, with all England waiting to do her homage. ”

“ Noble-hearted, deeply God-loving woman as she was, her beautiful spirit on the verge of eternal glory, must have often contemplated the dark clouds on England’s horizon with the most poignant and tender sorrow, and her anxiety for the many difficulties likely to surround her son, our King, must have been acute and pitiful indeed. ”

“ Her goodness, her sympathy, were so much part of ourselves, and were so deeply entwined in the very heart and life and soul of the nation, that we have seldom allowed ourselves to think of the possibility of her being taken from us. ”

“ 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 ”

“ WAR and rumours of war,—nation rising against nation,—these fulfilled and yet threatening disasters have culminated in the worst disaster of all, the “passing” of the greatest, purest, best, and most blameless Monarch in our history. England’s Queen is dead! The words sound as heavily as though one should say, “The sun is no longer in the sky!” Strange indeed is it to think of England without the Mother-Queen of the great British people;—to realize4 that she, the gentle and beneficent Lady of the Land, has left us for ever! ”

“ There was never a great name but was not slandered by the envious,—never a high reputation that some coward did not strive to attack and tarnish—never a splendid fame that did not serve as a target for the arrows of the mean and the malicious. And the worst lies and slanders are always said and written of those whose position is too exalted to allow them either answer or self-defence. ”

“ Much of our restlessness combined with discontent is our own fault, because so many of us go the wrong way to work with our lives, and try, not to help each other, but to overbear each81 other down. Simplicity of life is best; natural and innocent pleasures are best; and happiness comes quickest to those who are not seeking it. Our late Queen chose a simple life because she knew it was the wisest, the healthiest, and the nearest to God; she disapproved of vanity, ostentation, and extravagance, because she knew that these things have only one ending, vice and ruin. ”

“ They were an outrage, and, taken in combination with a fictitious and disgraceful ‘interview’ with ‘the Queen’s physician,’ which has caused much pain and annoyance, they contribute a real danger to the better class of journalism, and, through it, to the public. How can journalists expect to be treated with consideration when, on an occasion so mournful, they behave in a manner so horribly contrary to common decency? ”

“ The great thing, therefore, is to live here and now, the daily life of29 simplicity and self-denial such as our late glorious Queen lived. For if by the rule of courts we must wear outward black as a sign of mourning for her loss, let us in our hearts inwardly rejoice that God found her so pure, so ready for the highest bliss of Heaven. Sixty-three years of the most exalted position in the world, sixty-three years of undisputed sovereignty over millions of human beings, neither spoilt the earthly Woman nor the heavenly Soul which God had made our Queen. ”

“ Yet, without assuming the rôle of a soothsayer crossing the pathway of a Cæsar, those who truly “fear God and honour the King,” and have neither favours to ask, nor interests to serve, cannot but entertain without undue foreboding certain fears for his well-being. Dark to him, personally speaking, must be this particular turn in his pathway, when he takes up the Imperial Crown, glistening more with tears than with jewels, and dons the heavy robes of ceremonious state, for he has already lived long and lost much. ”

“ During the brief time that has elapsed since our late glorious Sovereign’s death, there has been far too much dragging-in of the King’s name to matters “theatrical and sporting,” in the Press,—and it is of far more interest to the nation50 to remember how ardently he, as Prince of Wales, has worked for good and charitable aims, how much he has helped to promote the cause of the poor, the weak and the aged, and how generously and promptly he has always given his personal aid and influence to relieve any immediate suffering. ”

“ 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 from7 that radiant Essence like the husk from ripe corn, and sets it free to an eternity of endless joy, work and wisdom ”

“ It is “morbid” some people will tell us to believe that there is a Divine Intelligence from whose observation no smallest thing escapes; and yet if the conscience be clear how far from “morbid,” how healthy, how reasonable, how comforting is such belief!—for, no matter how evilly we are spoken of, how vilely we are slandered,—no matter what sorrows we suffer or what losses we endure, all will be righted by that Eternal Justice at the end, when, “through the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.” ”

“ But for us who remain behind, striving to peer beyond “the portals of the sunset;”—for us who enter on a new era without her, there are dim shadows of fear and doubt which we cannot altogether dismiss from our minds. ”

“ His Majesty is known to despise compliments, therefore those who are anxious to ingratiate themselves in the Royal favour will be careful not to make them. But open adulation is a far less dangerous evil than the appearance of blunt and bluff honesty which covers the deepest motives of self-interest. And the men who practise this specious form of candid and fair dealing are those who are likely to work mischief to both society and government. The King’s position is one of far more difficulty than that of the late Queen ”

“ Of gracious manner and rare dignity, she, too, possesses the love of home and home surroundings which so notably distinguished our late Queen, and56 it may be prophesied that her quiet influence will maintain the Court at that high standard of combined excellence, brilliancy and intellectuality which shall give the key-note to manners and culture throughout Europe. All the same we shall do well to remember that society is not what it was in the early Victorian days, and also that with the spread of educational systems, the masses of the people equally are not what they were. ”