And after some less convincing circumstance of entry to a Valhalla he ends by telling how these graven characters calm him.
"When not to hear some try to talk,
And some to clean their guns and sing,
And some dig deeper in the chalk—
I look upon my ring:
And nerves relax that were most tense,
And Death comes whistling down unheard,
As I consider all the sense
Held in that mystic word.
And it brings, quieting like balm
My heart whose flutterings have ceased,
The resignation and the calm
And wisdom of the East."
Ample quotation seemed needed to illumine this soldier's fine attitude. His style takes no end of room; more time was demanded than love and arms could spare for it to grow as rare as it was large. Still, granted a more prolonged lease of pleasure-hunting, we might have had to deplore luxuriance tangled to perversity, no longer merely grown too fast for strength. To what extent war was a tonic to his extravagance remains uncertain, even after repeated readings of his later poems. Every young man has perforce many possible careers—unwritten books whose titles and contents we may dream of, though hands will never part their leaves, nor eyes peruse. Still there is some faint compensation for this in esteeming them at their highest possible value, though it but increase our sense of loss; for worth conceived is prophetic of that yet to be revealed by the ever-teeming future.
Look at him crowning himself, prematurely, as Shakespeare's hero prince did, yet, like him, conscious of deserving the "rigol" by innate capacity and determina-
