In the first days of the century just passed, the British buried their Queen with an empire's lamentation. Plump but diminutive, aged and wasted by disease, Victoria was lowered into a casket crowded with memorabilia: bracelets, rings, lockets of hair, plaster casts of the hands of those she loved, the dressing gown of her long-mourned Albert. Her coffin was as cluttered as the mantelpieces of her subjects, whose compulsion to collect expressed their need to grasp at stability in a world in radical transformation.

The Victorians who speak to us most urgently today thought of themselves as living not in an age of peace or progress but, in John Stuart Mill's phrase, in ‘an age of transition,’ caught between a vanishing past and an uncertain future. Such an unsettled cultural climate provided rich soil for the flourishing of elegy. The Gothic Revival embodied this nostalgia in stone. When the ancient Houses of Parliament spectacularly burned to the ground on the night of 16 October 1834, the nation chose to rehouse its government in an edifice that looked back longingly to the Middle Ages. Oxford, the home of lost causes and itself a kind of medieval Eden of cloistered spires and chiming bells, gave rise to the Oxford Movement, which sought to revive the fervor and ancient rituals of the medieval Church, a movement that led in time to the conversion to Catholicism of two of our most greatly gifted elegists, John Henry Newman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.