Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/293

Rh A delight in the loveliness of nature, a passion for life and all the beauty and mystery of it find expression in the sensitive music and jewelled phrasing of the poems he wrote at peace in his homeland or in Paris; but there is a deeper note of feeling, a more passionate sincerity, in the verses he wrote after he had started on his last adventure, down the Valley of the Shadow. I think if he had lived another year he would have revised some bitter passages of his 'Message to America' and of his glorious ode 'In Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France'; but assuredly he would have left untouched in the former his call to his countrymen to pay homage to the French who 'wanted the war no more than you,' but would fight heroically to the end 'for their hearths, their altars, and their past.' Nor would he have found it necessary to take anything from his triumphant eulogy of those Americans, his friends, who had died beside him for Liberty:

Yet sought they neither recompense nor praise,

Nor to be mentioned in another breath