Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/68

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I, that on my familiar hill

Saw with uncomprehending eyes

A hundred of Thy sunsets spill

Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

Ere the sun swings his noonday sword

Must say good-bye to all of this:

By all delights that I shall miss,

Help me to die, O Lord.

The sturdy, sober courage of this matches Grenfell's brave ecstasy. The difference between them is only of tone and temperament—the same fighting blood is in each, as it was in the long-ago Cavalier and Roundhead. Maybe it is that our race is compact of these two elements; the Cavalier and Roundhead have intermarried and are inextricably mixed in us all, but in very varying proportions. They came near, perhaps, to striking a balance in Rupert Brooke. He responded so instantly to 'the call' that he was a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy in September 1914, and in October took part in the Antwerp expedition. His greeting of the war shouts in that first of his sonnets, 'Peace,' with all the exultation that is in Grenfell's lines, but not because he foretasted the joy of