his own death, the note of a deeper emotional experience is heard, and the poetry gains thereby. In the best of his poems there is a mingling of austerity and ornateness, of ardour and discipline, which gives them a peculiar distinction. And at the core of them is a spiritual fire burning clearest in that poem (omitted from our selection for lack or room) which ends with the cry:

"Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so,

Dark Angel! triumph over me:

Lonely, unto the Lone I go;

Divine, to the Divinity."

LAURENCE BINYON.

BY THE STATUE OF KING CHARLES AT CHARING CROSS

Sombre and rich, the skies;

Great glooms, and starry plains.

Gently the night wind sighs;
Else a vast silence reigns.

The splendid silence clings.
Around me; and around
The saddest of all kings
Crowned, and again discrowned.
Comely and calm, he rides
Hard by his own Whitehall:
Only the night wind glides:
No crowds, nor rebels, brawl.

Gone too, his Court; and yet,
The stars his courtiers are:
Stars in their stations set;
And every wandering star.

Alone he rides, alone,
The fair and fatal king:
Dark night is all his own,
That strange and solemn thing.

Which are more full of fate:

The stars; or those sad eyes?
Which are more still and great:
Those brows; or the skies?

Although his whole heart yearn
In passionate tragedy:
Never was face so stern
With sweet austerity.

Vanquished in life, his death
By beauty made amends:
The passing of his breath
Won his defeated ends.

Brief life, and hapless? Nay:
Through death, life grew sublime.
Speak after sentence? Yea;
And to the end of time.

Armoured he rides, his head
Bare to the stars of doom:
He triumphs now, the dead,
Beholding London's gloom.

Our wearier spirit faints,
Vexed in the world's employ:
His soul was of the saints;
And art to him was joy.

King, tried in fires of woe!
Men hunger for thy grace:
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face.

Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.

THE CHURCH OF A DREAM

Sadly the dead leaves rustle in the whistling wind,
Around the weather-worn, gray church, low down the vale:
The Saints in glorious vesture shake before the gale;

The glorious windows shake, where still they dwell enshrined;

Old Saints by long dead, shrivelled hands long since designed:
There still, although the world autumnal be, and pale,
Still in thin golden vesture the old Saints prevail;
Alone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind.

Only one ancient Priest offers the Sacrifice,
Murmuring holy Latin immemorial:

Swaying with tremulous hands the old censer full of spice,
In gray, sweet incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical:
To him, in place of men, for he is old, suffice
Melancholy remembrances and vesperal.

THE END

I gave you more than love: many times more:
I gave mine honour into your fair keeping.
You lost mine honour: wherefore now restore
The love I gave; not dead, but cold and sleeping.
You loveless, I dishonoured, go our ways:
Dead is the past: dead must be all my days.

Death and the shadows tarry not: fulfil
Your years with folly and love's imitation.
You had mine all: mine only now, to kill

All trembling memories of mine adoration.

That done, to lie me down, and die, and dream,
What once, I thought you were: what still, you seem.

WALTER PATER

Gracious God rest him! he who toiled so well
Secrets of grace to tell

Graciously; as the awed rejoicing priest

Officiates at the feast,

Knowing how deep within the liturgies
Lie hid the mysteries.

Half of a passionately pensive soul

He showed us, not the whole:

Who loved him best, they best, they only, knew
The deeps they might not view;

That which was private between God and him;
To others, justly dim.

Calm Oxford autumns and preluding springs!
To me your memory brings

Delight upon delight, but chiefest one:
The thought of Oxford's son,

Who gave me of his welcome and his praise,
When white were still my days;

Ere death had left life darkling, nor had sent
Lament upon lament:

Ere sorrow told me how I loved my lost
And bade me base love's cost.

Scholarship's constant saint, he kept her light
In him divinely white:

With cloistral jealousness of ardour strove
To guard her sacred grove,

Inviolate by worldly feet, nor paced

In desecrating haste.

Oh, sweet grave smiling of that wisdom, brought
From arduous ways of thought;

Oh, golden patience of that travailing soul
So hungered for the goal,

And vowed to keep, through subtly vigilant pain,
From pastime on the plain,

Enamoured of the difficult mountain air
Up beauty's Hill of Prayer!

Ended, his service: yet albeit farewell

Tolls the faint vesper bell,

*

Patient beneath his Oxford trees and towers
He still is gently ours:

Hierarch of the spirit, pure and strong,

Worthy Uranian song.

Gracious God keep him: and God grant to me
By miracle to see

That unforgettably most gracious friend,

In the never-ending end.

RUPERT BROOKE

[RUPERT BROOKE was born at Rugby, August 3, 1887, and educated at Rugby School, where his father, William Brooke, was a housemaster. In 1905 he won a prize with a poem on The Bastille. In 1906 he went up to King's College, Cambridge, and after taking a classical degree, lived at Grantchester, publishing his first volume of poems in 1911. In 1913 he was elected a Fellow of King's, and started for a year's travel in America, Samoa, and Tahiti. In September, 1914, he joined the Hood Division of the R. N. V. R. as a sub-lieutenant; took part in the Antwerp expedition in October, and sailed again on February 28, 1915, for the Dardanelles. He died of blood-poisoning at Lemnos, April 23, 1915, on board a French hospital ship, and was buried in the island of Imbros. A second volume of his collected verse, 1914 and other Poems, was published in 1915, shortly after his death.]

Few men are so obviously born to distinction as Rupert Brooke; he shone from first to last, and seldom disappointed expectation. He had no disadvantages to contend with; his athletic and intellectual gifts matched the beauty of his form and face; his whole personality was radiant. When his first volume of poems appeared it gained at once the recognition which his friends had anticipated: among the new constellation of the "Georgian Poets" he was instantly seen to be the brightest star. So much ardour and freshness put forth with such sureness of utterance, seemed to call only for enthusiasm. The volume was followed by a number of single poems, all beautiful and successful; then came the five sonnets on the War, a self-dedication and a forecast of a happy warrior's death. Lastly, when that forecast had been fulfilled and deeply mourned, a final volume was received with an outpouring of affectionate admiration, such as has seldom been given to a young poet by his contemporaries. It was made clear that in a great moment, black with storm, his radiance had lightened the eyes of his countrymen.

It has been questioned whether such a reputation, won, as it were, by surprise, and confirmed in the emotion of a national crisis, is likely to stand the test of time. Time will show; but it may be noted that Brooke's work is remarkable for originality