A sudden roar, a mighty rushing sound,
a jolt or two, a smoothly sliding rise,
a jumbled blur of disappearing ground,
and then all sense of motion slowly dies.
Quiet and calm, the earth slips past below,
as underneath a bridge still waters flow....
a first poem as remarkable for its technical finish as for its graphic, imaginative realism. He followed this, a few months later, with 'An Airman's Dream,' which was, as he says in a scribbled note in his note-book, written after he had been reading Rupert Brooke's 'Granchester.' From earliest childhood, he adds, 'I had sent myself to sleep and endured dull sermons by thinking of my house and its surroundings,' and it is a vision of these that comes to him again in the air:
When I am wearied through and through,
and all the things I have to do
are senseless, peevish little things,
my mind escapes on happier wings
to an old house that is mine own,
lichen-kissed and overgrown;
with gables here and gables there
and tapered chimneys everywhere,
with millstone hearths for burning logs,
