There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready for
laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the noblest of
replies. Many loved her; all admired. She passed (I will suppose) by
this street or by that; she sat at table in such and such a house;
Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there were men who had
the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter with their own. And the
house where she moved is there and the street in which she walked, and
the very furniture she used and touched with her hands you may touch
with your hands. You shall come into the rooms that she inhabited, and
there you shall see her portrait, all light and movement and grace and
beatitude.

She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures will
never be seen again. She was under a law; she changed, she suffered, she
grew old, she died; and there was her place left empty. The not living
things remain; but what counted, what gave rise to them, what made them
all that they are, has pitifully disappeared, and the greater, the
infinitely greater, thing was subject to a doom perpetually of change
and at last of vanishing. The dead surroundings are not subject to such
a doom. Why?

All those boys who held the line of the low ridge or rather swell of
land from Hougoumont through the Belle Alliance have utterly gone. More
than dust goes, more than wind goes; they will never be seen again.
Their voices will never be heard--they are not. But what is the mere
soil of the field without them? What meaning has it save for their
presence?

I could wish to understand these things.