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 with the thought: "In bitter days the soul finds God, God us"; the tragedy in Oriental mask, called ; the noble tragic narrative of, in which fragments from the Song of Roland give the keynote; and so on through the two recent dramas dealing with the invincible "lost cause" of Christ.

To Masefield I think that the most beautiful and exulting thing in the world—the fairest form into which our transitory lives can flame, rushing into darkness—is the courage of men who have been faithful unto death. The heroic thrills him to his heart's core. Yet for him the World War was a long overshadowing agony, lit only by the blazing glory of human endurance. He followed the Red Cross to one of the most desperate battlefields to share its perils and to alleviate its miseries. These lines remind us in what mood men of peace in those days bowed to doom and

From that tragedy Masefield returned with an immense and desperate compassion for the animula—God's waif, the human soul—poor, thin, little tenant of this falling house of flesh, bewildered wanderer among his own juggernauts and thunders, along the roaring abysses of oblivion. The dedicated "To My American Friends" in 1916 are an intensely realistic expression of a bitter quest, ending in the impersonally consolatory thought that

Since the War Mr. Masefield has, I suspect, steadied himself by leaning heavily on the joy of people who do not think and feel deeply. In, and —outstanding narrative poems of these later years—friendly critics have hailed a recovery of that fluent, exuberant, creative energy, objective, dramatic, and sensuous, which first astonished and delighted them in  [27]