The Life of John Ruskin Part 27

On the Wednesday we made our sad procession to the church, through storm and flood. The village was in mourning, and round the churchyard gates men, women, and children stood in throngs. The coffin was carried in by eight of those who had been in his employ, and the church filled noiselessly with neighbours and friends, who after a hymn, and the Lord's prayer, and a long silence, pa.s.sed up the aisles for their last look, and to heap more offerings of wreaths and flowers around the bier.

At dusk tall candles were lit, and so through the winter's night watch was kept.

Thursday, the 25th, brought together a great a.s.sembly, great for the remoteness of the place and the inclemency of the weather. The country folk have a saying "Happy is the dead that the rain rains on;" and the fells were darkly clouded and the beck roared by, swollen to a torrent.

The church was far too small to hold the congregation, which included most of his personal friends and the representatives of many public bodies. A crowd stood outside in the storm while the service went on.

It began with a hymn written for the occasion by Canon Rawnsley who with the Vicar of Hawkshead, Brantwood's parish church, read the Psalms. A hymn, "Comes at times a stillness as of even," was sung by his friend Miss Wakefield; and the lesson read by Canon Richmond, arrived officially to represent the Bishop of Carlisle, but to most of us representing old times and the comrades.h.i.+ps of his youth and early manhood. The Vicar of Coniston and the Rev. Reginald Meister, on behalf of the Dean of Christ Church, also took part in the service. When the Dead March sounded the coffin was covered with a pall given by the Ruskin Linen Industry of Keswick, lined with bright crimson silk, and embroidered with the motto, "Unto This Last," and with his favourite wild roses showered over the gray field, just as they fall in the _Primavera_ of Botticelli. There was no black about his burying, except what we wore for our own sorrow; it was remembered how he hated black, so much that he would even have his mother's coffin painted blue; and among the white and green and violet of the wreaths that filled the chancel, none was more significant in its sympathy than Mrs. Severn's great cross of red roses.

As we carried him down the churchyard path, a drop or two fell from the boughs, but a gleam of suns.h.i.+ne, the first after many days, shot along the crags from under the cloud, and the wind paused. Standing there by the graveside, who could help being thankful that he had found so lovely a resting-place after so tranquil a falling to sleep? At his feet, parted only by the fence and the garden, is the village school; and who does not know how he loved the children of Coniston? At his right hand are the graves of the Beevers; his last old friend, Miss Susan Beever, lies next to him. Over the spot hang the thick boughs of a fir-tree--who does not know what he has written of his favourite mountain-pine? And behind the church, shut in with its dark yews', rise the crags of Coniston, those that he wearied for in his boyhood, beneath which he prayed, in sickness, to lie down and rest. "The crags are lone on Coniston."