However, the Abbey could not altogether refrain from doing him honour, and through streets lined with people, many of them the poorest in the land, most of them wearing some outward sign of mourning, a bit of black ribbon or a scrap of crape, followed by deputations from almost every charitable association, the coffin was carried to Westminster. Around it stood high and low, rich and poor. The wreaths sent by royal princes lay Bide by side with the tributes from the flower-girls and the boys on the training-ships. A mighty volume of sound ascended to the vaulted roof, as the familiar hymn was sung--
"Let saints on earth in concert sing, With those whose rest is won, For all the servants of our King In earth and heaven are one!"
Then the organ ceased, the Blessing was given, and the great procession left the Abbey to the march of the coster-mongers' band, to the tramp of thousands of feet, whose way in life he had made more easy and more blessed.
In the north aisle of the nave rest three great men, builders in another way, who have served the world by their thoughts--Newton, Herschel, and Darwin.
Sir Isaac Newton made one of the most wonderful discoveries in the world of science and nature, the law of gravitation, and also invented a method by which the whole course of a comet could be calculated. On his monument you will see a globe, covered with constellations and the path of a comet, while below are groups of children weighing the sun and the moon. The long Latin epitaph was one which greatly offended Dr. Johnson, who said that "none but philosophers could understand it."
Sir John Herschel was the son of a distinguished father, and from his boyhood he resolved to follow in his father's footsteps. "To put my shoulders to the wheel, and to leave the world a little better than I found it," was the ideal he set before himself whilst at Cambridge, and in this spirit he carried on the work of making a careful study of the stars in the southern hemisphere, which had never been done before.
Besides astronomy he was devoted to books, especially to poetry, and translated many of Schiller's poems, as well as parts of the "Iliad," into English. "Give a man," he said, "once the taste for reading good books, and you place him in contact with the best society in every period of history, with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest of characters who have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a contemporary of all ages."