Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/152

114 year fell leading his men in battle. 'A trench had to be held at all costs and the Germans prevented from advancing. Johnson without hesitation undertook the task but bade his friends good-bye, fully certain that he should not return.' The prophecy of his sonnet, 'Spring, 1915,' had so come to fulfilment, for looking then on the blossoming of the lilac and laburnum he had told himself—

You may learn from his poems that he was in love with life, and finely sensitive to the beauty of all that part of the world that human hands have not made. Mr. Giles hints that when in his verse on classical themes, 'Hylas' and 'Persephone,' he is touching in descriptions of scenes in Thessaly or Sicily, he is really describing the woods and streams that were round about his home at Saffron