Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/24

18 satisfied, and baiting the thin-blooded philosophers, enjoyed indeed shocking and baiting himself; but he also delighted, for the pure intellectual exercise, in looking, as we say, all round a thing. If, unlike Methuselah, he did not live long enough to see life whole, he at least confronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcerting stare. If he was anywhere at ease, it was in "the little nowhere of the brain." Again and again, for instance, he speculates on the life that follows death. First (mere chronological order is not absolutely material) he imagines the Heaven of the fish:

Next, he laments despairingly in Tahiti, with a kind of wistful mockery, at the thought of an immortality wherein all is typical and nothing real: