of unequal merit, were full of humorous delight in the New World.

In one of his travel papers he described the city of Quebec as having
"the radiance and repose of an immortal." "That, in so many words,"

wrote Mr. Walter de la Mare, "brings back his living remembrance. . . .
With him there was a happy shining impression that he might have just come

-- that very moment -- from another planet, one well within
the solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours."

Not even Stevenson, it would seem, excited a greater enthusiasm
among his friends; and between the two men an interesting parallel

might be drawn. Brooke made a pilgrimage to Stevenson's home in Samoa,
and his life in the Pacific found full and happy expression in his verse.

His thoughts, however, turned longingly to England,
the land "where Men with Splendid Hearts may go," and he reappeared

from the ends of the earth among his friends as apparently little changed
"as one who gaily and laughingly goes to bed and gaily and laughingly

comes down next morning after a perfectlyrefreshing sleep."
Then came the War. "Well, if Armageddon's ON," he said,

"I suppose one should be there." It was a characteristic way
of putting it. He obtained a commission in the Hood Battalion

of the Royal Naval Division in September, and was quickly ordered
on the disastrous if heroicexpedition to Antwerp. Here he had

his first experience of war, lying for some days in trenches
shelled by the distant German guns. Then followed a strange retreat

by night along roads lit by the glare of burning towns,
and swarming with pitiful crowds of Belgian refugees.

Yet as Mr. Walter de la Mare said of him, when he returned from Antwerp,
"Ulysses himself at the end of his voyagings was not more quietly

accustomed to the shocks of novelty."
On Brooke, as on many other young men, to whom the gift of self-expression

has perhaps been denied, the war had a swiftly maturing influence.
Much of the impetuosity of youth fell away from him. The boy who had been

rather proud of his independent views -- a friend relates how
at the age of twelve he sat on the platform at a pro-Boer meeting --

grew suddenly, it seemed, into a man filled with the love of life indeed,
but inspired most of all with the love of England. Fortunately for himself

and for us, Brooke's patriotism found passionate" target="_blank" title="a.易动情的；易怒的">passionate voice in the sonnets
which are rightly given pride of place in the 1914 section of this volume.

Mr. Clement Shorter, who gives us the skeleton of a bibliography
that is all too brief, draws special attention to `New Numbers',

a quarterly publication issued in Gloucestershire,
to which Brooke contributed in February, April, August, and December

of last year, his fellow poets being Lascelles Abercrombie,
John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. He spent the winter

in training at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire, and sailed with
the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on the last day of February.

He had a presentiment of his death, but he went, as so many others
have gone,

"Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,
Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows,

Sweeps out to darkness, triumphing in his goal,
Out of the fire, out of the little room. . . .

-- There is an end appointed, O my soul!"
He never reached the Dardanelles. He went first to Lemnos

and then to Egypt. Early in April he had a touch of sunstroke
from which he recovered; but he died from blood-poisoning on board

a French hospital ship at Scyros on Friday, April 23rd -- died for England
on the day of St. Michael and Saint George. He was buried at night,

by torchlight, in an olive grove about a mile inland. "If you go there,"
writes Mr. Stephen Graham, "you will find a little wooden cross

with just his name and the date of his birth and his death marked on it
in black." A few days later the news of his death was published

in the `Times' with the following appreciation:
"W. S. C." writes: "Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral

at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed
to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible,

a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice
to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war,

than any other -- more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender,
and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently

from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes
and the memory remain; but they will linger.

"During the last few months of his life, months of preparation
in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told

with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die,
and the sure, triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit.

He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England
whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink

in perfect serenity, with absoluteconviction of the rightness
of his country's cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellowmen.

"The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable
war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands

of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest,
the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought.

They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself.
Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry

of mind and body, ruled by high, undoubting purpose, he was all
that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice

but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that
which is most freely proffered."

"W. S. C.", as many probably guessed at the time, was the Rt. Hon.
Winston Spencer Churchill, a personal friend and warm admirer of the poet.

Many other tributes followed, notably from an anonymous writer
in the `Spectator', from Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Edward Thomas,

Mr. Holbrook Jackson, Mr. Jack Collings Squire, Mr. James Douglas,
Mr. Drinkwater, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie.

From most of these writers I have already quoted at some length,
but space must yet be found for the last three, the surviving members

of the brilliant quartette who produced `New Numbers'. Mr. Drinkwater
wrote as follows: "There can have been no man of his years in England

who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal
to the affection of every one who knew him, while there has not been,

I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death of Shelley.
Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely

to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and shapely zest
that are in his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity."

Mr. Wilfrid Gibson's tribute took the form of a short poem
called "The Going":

He's gone.
I do not understand.

I only know
That, as he turned to go

And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,

And I was dazzled by a sunset glow --
And he was gone.

Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, now perhaps the greatest of our younger poets
and a warm personal friend of Brooke's, wrote at greater length:

"`And the worst friend and enemy is but Death' . . . `And if these
poor limbs die, safest of all.' So ended two of the five sonnets,

with the common title `1914', which Rupert Brooke wrote
while he was in training, between the Antwerp expedition and sailing

for the Aegean. These sonnets are incomparably the finest utterance
of English poetryconcerning the Great War. We knew the splendid promise

of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry; these sonnets are the brief perfection
of his achievement. They are much more than that: they are among

the few supreme utterances of English patriotism. It was natural, perhaps,
that they should leave all else that has been written about the war

so far behind. It is not so much that they are the work of a talent
scarcely, in its own way, to be equalled to-day; it was much more

that they were the work of a poet who had for his material the feeling
that he was giving up everything to fight for England --

the feeling, I think, that he was giving his life for England.
Reading these five sonnets now, it seems as if he had in them written

his own epitaph. I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said
in my last talk with him makes me believe that -- now. At any rate,

the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies,
has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time