The word came forth with a majestic sonority; for her voice now--how changed from the silvery treble of her girlhood--was a contralto, full and strong.
IV The final years were years of apotheosis.

In the dazzled imagination of her subjects Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory.

Criticism fell dumb; deficiencies which, twenty years earlier, would have been universally admitted, were now as universally ignored.

That the nation's idol was a very incomplete representative of the nation was a circumstance that was hardly noticed, and yet it was conspicuously true.

For the vast changes which, out of the England of 1837, had produced the England of 1897, seemed scarcely to have touched the Queen.