And this world is defied as gallantly as the other:
"Let not propriety nor prejudice
Nor the precepts of jealous age deny
What Sense so incontestably affirms;
Cling to the blessed moment and drink deep
Of the sweet cup it tends, as there alone
Were that which makes life worth the pain to live."
Nay, not even death, and what dreams may follow, can give him pause:
"Exiled afar from youth and happy love,
If Death should ravish my fond spirit hence
I have no doubt but, like a homing dove,
It would return to its dear residence,
And through a thousand stars find out the road
Back into earthly flesh that was its loved abode."
Neither heaven nor the possibilities of time and space can offer anything better, a return to known delights is all that can be desired. The old have not infrequently gazed back with something of this feeling, and the illusions of perspective may excuse them; but that a young man should be so certain that he has seen the bottom of the cup of happiness, and that it could never be refilled with rarer liquors, suggests a near-sighted imagination. So masterful a conviction that no finer means than those you were born with could achieve more exquisite ends sets the mind pondering; and a plausible philosophy might maintain that youth's vivid apprehension of the worth of actual objects, persons and events was the source of all significance, the criterion by which everything else is really judged. Wordsworth could almost have subscribed to this belief; he expressed a very similar intuition though with a less truculent directness. In fact I think this comparison brings home to us a failure in the mood of Alan Seeger's ecstasy. We have all met these gifted young men who seem to tread above the
