Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/365

Rh did no more, maybe, than the sons of any land might do, but they did it with an eagerness and a joy in the self-sacrifice that could not have been possible to them had they been dying for a land that was all unworthy of them. Nor was it solely because they were more or less distantly of our blood that Canada, Australasia, South Africa, and the rest of our scattered commonwealth remained so loyal to us. It touches us with pride and yet humbles us to think we can glimpse something of Canada's thought and feeling towards 'Britain' in these glowing lines by one of Canada's poets, Wilfred Campbell, who has died since the war moved his nation to show that his were no empty words:

Great patient Titan, 'neath thy wearying load

Of modern statecraft, human helpfulness;

To whom do come earth's weak in their distress

To crave thine arm to avert the oppressor's goad:

Thou sovereignty within thine isled abode,

Hated and feared, where thou wouldst only bless,

By fools who dream thine iron mightiness

Will crumble in ruin across the world's wide road.

Though scattered thy sons o'er leagues of empire's rim,

Alien, remote, by severing wind and tide;