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They were marching very slowly with a deliberation that puzzled Desnoyers, who could not make out whether this recessional meant flight or change of position. The only thing that gave him any satisfaction was the stupefied and downcast appearance of the soldiers, the gloomy sulks of the officers. Nobody was shouting; they all appeared to have forgotten their "Nach Paris!"
If to some catholic medievalists his reign seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the superficial unity of Christendom.
Mary Gage heard the door close, heard the footsteps of her friend passing down the little hall. She was alone again. Her heart was throbbing high. What she first had seen was the soul of a man; a man's confession; his recessional as well. Now she knew that he was indeed going away from her life forever. Which had been more cruel, blindness or vision? The night wore on slowly.
"Common tunes that make you choke and blow your nose, Vulgar tunes that bring the laugh that brings the groan I can rip your very heart-strings out with those." Some of his later work shows increasing seriousness of tone. The Recessional and the Hymn before Action are elevated in thought and expression. The bigness of L'Envoi shows poetic power capable of higher flights:
Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the Census Man found 254 who were still unmarried. In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275. There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage at present.
Nat Hicks, a wry-faced, curiously sweet woman, so awed by her betters that Carol wanted to kiss her, completed the day's grim task by a paper on "Other Poets." The other poets worthy of consideration were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Gray, Mrs. Hemans, and Kipling. Miss Ella Stowbody obliged with a recital of "The Recessional" and extracts from "Lalla Rookh."
The feeling in those with whom I have talked, is rather the feeling of Kipling's Recessional a profound and wondering recognition that the Imperial bond has indeed stood so magnificently the test of these four years, just as Joseph Chamberlain, the Empire-builder, believed and hoped it would stand, when the day of testing came; a pride in what the Empire has done too deep for many words; coupled with the stubborn resolution, which says little and means everything that the future shall be worthy of the past.
In English literature this note of "Recessional" was sounded long before Kipling. Milton, though he claimed that "God's manner" was to reveal himself "first to His Englishmen," added that they "mark not the methods of His counsel and are unworthy." "Is India free," wrote Cowper, "or do we grind her still?" "Secure from actual warfare," sang Coleridge, "we have loved to swell the war-whoop."
"'God! Surely he didn't say 'God," Stuart brooded. "Does God, the august, mysterious, awful creator of the universe, work like this? Did not the God of heaven and earth give this woman to him beneath the sunny skies of the South while their souls sang for joy?" They were moving again down the aisle, the organ throbbing the recessional from Mendelssohn.
This manner about them, as one may call it in general, often contributes to your impression that they make for a certain strain of related modesty which may on occasion be one of their happiest effects; it at any rate, in days when my acquaintance with them was slighter, used to leave me gaping at the treasure of operation, the far recessional perspectives, it took for granted and any offered demonstration of the extent or the mysteries of which seemed unthinkable just in proportion as the human resultant testified in some one or other of his odd ways to their influence.
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