Walden. Through his poems, too, is a recurring sense of the shortness of life, the pathos of mortality, which is the whole burden of his 'Sunt Lacrimæ Rerum'—
O to think that Beauty liveth
Such a little while....
O to think that Love can ever
Feel the ice of Death....
O to think that Beauty dieth
Like a thing of dross,
Broken in the graveway lieth
Under leaf and moss,
All its passion and delight
Quenched amid the voiceless night.
Howbeit, the keynote of his verse is not despair nor sadness but that deep love of beauty and a hope of the budding morrow at midnight. Many of his poems were written at the front, 'some in the trenches on the battlefield whence the author did not return'; and not even Noel Hodgson's 'Before Battle' is inspired with a humbler, loftier faith, a larger spirit of humanity, than is Donald Johnson's 'Battle Hymn':
Lord God of battle and of pain,
Of triumph and defeat,
Our human pride, our strength's disdain
