class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[84]"/> interests were chiefly artistic, and he used his interest and knowledge in the best possible way for the public good when he was Mayor of Chelsea, and made his influence felt by imparting some quite new and much-needed ideals into that civic office.... But two known faces do not make a crowd familiar; and nothing will bring most of us any nearer to the knowledge of these voyagers than will the knowledge of what happened to them.

One thing we do know—a small thing and yet illuminating to our picture. There were many young people on board, many newly married, and some, we may be sure, for whom the voyage represented the gateway to romance; for no Atlantic liner ever sailed with a full complement and set down all its passengers in the emotional state in which it took them up. The sea is a great match-maker; and in those long monotonous hours of solitude many flowers of the heart blossom and many minds and characters strike out towards each other in new and undreamed-of sympathy.

Of this we may be as sure as of the existence of the ship: that there were on board the Titanic people watching the slip of moon setting early on those April nights for whom time and the world were quite arrested in their course, and for whom the whole ship and her teeming activities were but frame and setting for the perfect moment of their lives; for whom the thronging multitudes of their fellow passengers were but a blurred background against which the colour of their joy stood sharp and clear. The fields of foam-flecked blue, sunlit or cloud-shadowed by day; the starlight on the waters; the slow and scarcely perceptible swinging of the ship’s rail against the violet and spangled sky; the low murmur of voices, the liquid notes of violins, the trampling tune of the engines—to how many others have not these been the properties of a magic world; for how many others, as long as men continue to go in ships upon the sea, will they not be the symbols of a joy that is as old as time, and that is found to be new by every generation! For this also is one of the gifts of the sea, and one of the territories through which the long road passes.