Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/342

280 waiting for their cues to go on again, they opened their inmost thoughts in these verses of theirs, laid bare their ideals and the secret sources of their strength. Without some compelling cause which they could defend with clean consciences, some appeal to what was highest and most chivalrous in them, it is obvious in all they have written that they were not men who could have brought themselves to turn aside from the arts of peace to master the black art of war.

There are lyrics in St. Vincent Morris's little book that are thoughtful, fanciful, touched with religious fervour, and more carefully finished than his sonnet, 'The Eleventh Hour,' but there is nothing more simply earnest or more self-revealing. He was the son of Canon Morris, of Ashbourne, Derbyshire. When the war came he was only eighteen, too young for the Army, and the feeling that fretted him while he waited and made him glad to take up his duty as soon as he was old enough, finds an outlet in that sonnet: