sensitive nature, his was yet ever the search after the beautiful and the true.' He was a keen helper in the work of 'the small Wesley an community of his village,' and 'early, too, he tried to express himself with the brush, and gave great promise, though always the call of a written mode of expressing himself was with him.... His poems tell the secret of his whole life, which was an untiring love of nature,' and there is one line from them, says this friend,
O Liberty, at thy command, we challenge Death,
which 'tells in essence the reason that led one who hated war to go from that quiet North Derbyshire village to make one of the millions who are fighting for us and our Allies.' From the training camp at Hurdcott, from the trenches in France, he sent home his poems from time to time, pencilled on scraps of paper, and looked to revising them in proof, but he was reported wounded and missing in July 1916, and the following May, while his book was in the press, it was officially notified that he had been killed.
