HENRY JAMES
 

Roundabout the dawn of April 15 … the huge general gasp filled [the streets] like a great earth-shudder and people’s eyes met people’s eyes without the vulgarity of speech.  Even this was, all so strangely, part of the lift and the swell, as tragedy has but to be of a pure enough strain and a high enough connection to sow with its dark hand the seed of greater life.  The collective sense of what had occurred was of a sadness too noble not somehow to inspire, and it was truly in the air that, whatever we had as a nation produced or failed to produce, we could at least gather round this perfection of a classic woe.