Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/197

Rh with a mind that is keenly susceptible to natural beauty and to what is finest in the nature of man. Just because he was conscious of the goodness that was in men and was keen to see them live up to their highest level, he lashed with an indignant scorn their weaknesses, their snobbery, follies, meannesses, in the series of modern satires, Dislikes, that he published in 1914, the year that was to rouse us from many of the vanities he denounced and reawaken our slumbering ideals. It is not satire, though, that burns in the last poem in the book, 'Beauty Cast Out,' but a passionate earnestness of regret that the England of those latter years should, in Jonson's phrase, have 'let the noble and the precious go' in the race for wealth and material prosperity, that in her great towns the sense of beauty and the desire of it should have been banished by the lust for power and commercial gain:

Ye have your gains—

Your transient gains; ah, hug them to you fast,

For after all your toilings and your pains

Shall come a day to fling them wide at last,