Page:On the Margin; notes and essays, by Aldous Huxley.pdf/153

Rh But still all equals in their age of gladness Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun And once bore hops: and on that other day When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower Into an April morning, stirring and sweet And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence. A mightier charm than any in the Tower Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard, Soldiers in line, young English countrymen, Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums And fifes were playing "The British Grenadiers." The men, the music piercing that solitude And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed, And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too, feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost all Thomas's poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the tattered leaves.

Of the purely aesthetic qualities of Thomas's poetry it is unnecessary to say