Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/31

Rh He tells how the day has brought back to him "that tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want to walk 1000 miles, and write 1000 plays, and sing 1000 poems, and drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 1000 girls, and—oh, a million things!... The spring makes me almost ill with excitement. I go round corners on the roads shivering and nearly crying with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten one...." "Henceforward," writes Mr Marsh in another passage, "the only thing he cared for—or rather he felt he ought to care for—in a man, was the possession of goodness; its absence the one thing he hated.... It was the spirit, the passion that counted with him."

His verse tells the same tale. Life to poetry, poetry to life—that is one of the few virtuous circles. Life and thought to him were an endless adventure. His mind, as he says, was restless as a scrap of paper in the wind. His moods ebbed and flowed, even while his heart, that busy heart, as he called it, was deeply at rest. Wit to such a mind is a kind of safety-valve, or even the little whistle which the small boy pipes up for courage' sake in the dark. Letters and poems flash and tingle with wit—and rare