What is the Meaning of It, Watson?

"What is the meaning of it, Watson?... What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." -Sherlock Holmes, in The Cardboad Box, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It Is Always 1895

I've been a Sherlockian since I was a child, but over the last year my interest has been renewed, I don't know exactly why. I rewatched the entire Granada tv series (which aired from 1984 to 1994), was given The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie Klinger, for Christmas (I already owned The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by William S. Baring-Gould), attended a meeting of the Red Circle Society of Washington D.C., and bought a subscription to The Baker Street Journal.

Vincent Starrett said it best: "Shall they not always live in Baker Street? Are they not there this moment? Outside, the hansoms rattle through the rain, and Moriarty plans his latest devilry. Within, the sea coal flames upon the hearth and Holmes and Watson take their well-won ease....So they still live for all that love them well: in a romantic chamber of the heart, in a nostalgic country of the mind, where it is always 1895."

And in sonnet form:

221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

– Vincent Starrett

Unwept, Unhonored and Unsung

The last line of this excerpt from "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" by Sir Walter Scott has jangling around in my head recently. I couldn't remember what it was from. At last, the Google has come to my rescue. Here it is:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.