Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass,
You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old"—"And when we die
All's over that is ours: and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips," said I,
—"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"
"We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here,
Life is our cry. 'We have kept the faith!" we said;
We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness! . . . .
When the war began, in his usual characteristic way, he exclaimed: "Well, if Armageddon's on, I suppose one should be there,"—a calm acceptance of the inevitable, so far as the war was concerned, an unquestioning surrender of himself to the cause of his Country.
His love of life resolved itself into his love of England, which found its voice in his Sonnets of 1914, each in itself a pearl of price, a gem in the golden crown of his fame. These five sonnets are the splendid fulfilment of the promise of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry. In them he has reaped the first mature fruits of his genius and, in doing so, has written his own perfect epitaph.
His was a sincere and valiant spirit. His kindness of heart, his tolerance of all men were notable, the latter especially, when his youth is considered.
Joyous, fearless, ruled by high purpose, he serenely sacrificed himself for what he knew to be right and just, in the "hardest, cruellest and least rewarded of all the wars that men have fought."
We feel that we shall never truly know how great the loss has been to his country and to its literature, by
