and all the commonplaces of poetry with such profusion! Were but the young women addressed, ever qualified by an adjective proper to some one girl! No, Alan Seeger is alone felt, with this delightful freshness, a presence, an inspiration!
"Sidney, in whom the hey-day of romance
Came to its precious and most perfect flower,
Whether you turneyed with victorious lance
Or brought sweet roundelays to Stella's bower,
I give myself some credit for the way
I have kept clean of what enslaves and lowers,
Shunned the ideals of our present day
And studied those that were esteemed in yours—
For, turning from the mob that buys Success
By sacrificing all Life's better part,
Down the free roads of human happiness
I frolicked, poor of purse but light of heart,
And lived in strict devotion all along
To my three idols—Love and Arms and Song."
"I could accuse myself of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. . . . We are arrant knaves all"—in speaking thus was Hamlet so certainly mad as this sonnet implies? The worry and stress that "honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty" cost Grenfell are remembered with regret.
"I cannot rest
While aught of beauty in any path untrod
Swells into bloom and spreads sweet charms abroad
Unworshipped of my love. I cannot see
In Life's profusion and passionate brevity
How hearts enamoured of life can strain too much
In one long tension to hear, to see, to touch."
He is too eager, too arrogant, to await the visit of those wonders which steal unsought into consciousness. A "wise passiveness" was no mood of his. His ambition emulates Byron's, who hated to think himself a mere poet
