Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/127

Rh 'One of his outstanding qualities was his love of children,' writes the editor of his book, and you might guess as much from the simple and charming poem 'To Guy':

Until he joined the Artists' Rifles in 1915, when he was thirty-seven and might have been excused if he had not volunteered, Edward Thomas had written all his poetry in prose. There is a delicate play of fancy and imagination and a lapidary cunning in the verbal artistry of his essays and criticisms which make it less surprising that he should at last have found a medium of expression in verse than that he did not find it earlier. But none even of his intimates can have foreseen that, with his gentle manners, his diffident self-distrust and bookish preoccupations, he had in him the makings of a soldier. Chivalry, the finest sense of honour, steadiness of purpose and a quiet courage we always knew that he had;