photographs were submitted to Her Majesty, and
when, after careful inspection, she had approved of them, they were
placed in a series of albums, richly bound. Then, opposite each
photograph, an entry was made, indicating the number of the article, the
number of the room in which it was kept, its exact position in the room
and all its principal characteristics. The fate of every object which
had undergone this process was henceforth irrevocably sealed. The
whole multitude, once and for all, took up its steadfast station. And
Victoria, with a gigantic volume or two of the endless catalogue always
beside her, to look through, to ponder upon, to expatiate over, could
feel, with a double contentment, that the transitoriness of this world
had been arrested by the amplitude of her might.

Thus the collection, ever multiplying, ever encroaching upon new fields
of consciousness, ever rooting itself more firmly in the depths of
instinct, became one of the dominating influences of that strange
existence. It was a collection not merely of things and of thoughts,
but of states of mind and ways of living as well. The celebration of
anniversaries grew to be an important branch of it--of birthdays and
marriage days and death days, each of which demanded its appropriate
feeling, which, in its turn, must be itself expressed in an appropriate
outward form. And the form, of course--the ceremony of rejoicing
or lamentation--was stereotyped with the rest: it was part of the
collection. On a certain day, for instance, flowers must be strewn on
John Brown's monument at Balmoral; and the date of the yearly departure
for Scotland was fixed by that fact. Inevitably it was around the
central circumstance of death--death, the final witness to human
mutability--that these commemorative cravings clustered most thickly.
Might not even death itself be humbled, if one could recall enough--if
one asserted, with a sufficiently passionate and reiterated emphasis,
the eternity of love? Accordingly, every bed in which Victoria slept had
attached to it, at the back, on the right-hand side, above the pillow,
a photograph of the head and shoulders of Albert as he lay dead,
surmounted by a wreath of immortelles. At Balmoral, where memories came
crowding so closely, the solid signs of memory appeared in surprising
profusion. Obelisks, pyramids, tombs, statues, cairns, and seats of
inscribed granite, proclaimed Victoria's dedication to the dead. There,
twice a ye