Page:The Message and Ministrations of Dewan Bahadur R. Venkata Ratnam, volume 2.djvu/430

 could cherish. Therefore the offering need not be enriched with elaborate encomium or rendered weighty with deliberate judgment, if one undertakes to express one's unpremeditated sentiments on a solemn occasion like this.

Those lines of Scott which bemoaned a like national bereavement now come spontaneously to one's mind :

Such is the heavy sense of loss which weighs down the nation at the present day. The beacon light is quenched ; the warden rests still; the stately pillar is broken; and the nation is sunk in sorrow — not the gloom of despair, for that would argue the failure of his life; but the anguish of the aching enquiry, "What next? Who is to follow?"

His life can be described briefly yet happily in the lines in In Memoriam where the poet speaks of