PRO PATRIA
The association was obvious: how the price of lead would go up if England brought home all her dead "heroes" in hermetically-sealed caskets! My thought (so an anti-Imperialist might say) was like the smile of the hardened freebooter at the amiable sentimentalism of a comrade who was "yet but young in deed." But why should Mr. Kipling's rugged lines have cropped up in my memory rather than the smoother verses of other poets, equally familiar to me, and equally well fitted to point the contrast?—for instance, Mr. Housman's:
"It dawns in Asia, tombstones show,
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead."
Or Mr. Newbolt's:
"Qui procul hinc—the legend's writ,
The frontier grave is far away;
Qui ante diem periit,
Sed miles, sed pro patriâ.
The reason simply was that during the month I had spent in America the air had been filled with Kipling. His name was the first I had heard uttered on landing—by the conductor of a horse-car. Men of light and leading, and honourable women not a few, had vied with each other in quoting his refrains; and I had seen the crowded audience at a low music-hall stirred to enthusiasm by the delivery of a screed of maudlin verses on his illness. He, the rhapsodist
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