In the silence of the school-room, among the desks deserted,
Ink-stained and marred by marks of many hands,
Through the windows in the moonlight by driving rain-clouds skirted,
Come the visions of Old Boys from many lands.
And quietly and mournfully they take their well-known places,
And their books lie open by them on the form,
And they see, as in a mist-wraith, the old forgotten faces
With the scar-marks of the world's eternal storm.
Whilst Nicholas Todd was teaching at Sedbergh School, Robert Sterling was one of the students there. In 1912, Sterling went from Sedbergh to Pembroke College, Oxford. He was a brilliant classical scholar, fond enough of boating and football, but his love of literature, especially of poetry, dwarfed most of his other interests. 'He was something of a visionary,' says the friend who writes the memoir in his book; 'he used to wish that he could draw, feeling that so only—by artistic as well as literary expression, as in Blake—could he give adequate expression to his
