Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/153

Rh Walden. Through his poems, too, is a recurring sense of the shortness of life, the pathos of mortality, which is the whole burden of his 'Sunt Lacrimæ Rerum'—

Howbeit, the keynote of his verse is not despair nor sadness but that deep love of beauty and a hope of the budding morrow at midnight. Many of his poems were written at the front, 'some in the trenches on the battlefield whence the author did not return'; and not even Noel Hodgson's 'Before BattleBefore Action [sic]' is inspired with a humbler, loftier faith, a larger spirit of humanity, than is Donald Johnson's 'Battle Hymn':

Lord God of battle and of pain,

Of triumph and defeat,

Our human pride, our strength's disdain

Judge from Thy mercy-seat;