Upward, into the Hills, on the right hand,
Where the mists swim and the winds shriek and blow,
A homeless land and friendless. but a land
I did not know and that I wished to know.
II.
Such, such is Death: no triumph: no defeat:
Only an empty pail, a slate rubbed clean,
A merciful putting away of what has been.
And this we know: Death is not Life effete,
Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen
So marvellous things know well the end not yet.
Victor and vanquished are a-one in death:
Coward and brave: friend, foe. Ghosts do not say
"Come, what was your record when you drew your breath?"
But a big blot has hid each yesterday
So poor, so manifestly incomplete.
And your bright Promise withered long and sped,
Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet
And blossoms and is you, when you are dead.
These sonnets cannot compare for beauty and adequacy with Brooke's best, but the thought in them is perhaps even less expected, if not so certainly true. For us at least his promise is Sorley, now that he is dead. Death tempts us, nay forces us to overrate his actual production, and Reason in vain points out that the strait limits of his sensuous joys in image and language suggest that his poetical vein might have soon run dry. Yet not before he had enriched us, like another Matthew Arnold, with some equivalent for Empedocles, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy, we retort. The power which shapes a masterpiece includes that which matures the man of the world, and that which renders the critic accomplished. Youth binds these and the other tacts and aptitudes in a solid faggot, but after a time there is
