Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/32

26 indeed are the poems in our language which, like "Tiare Tahiti," "The Funeral of Youth," and "The Old Vicarage," are witty and lovely at the same time:

Few poets have mocked and made fun and made beauty like that, all in one breath, and certainly not the childlike visionaries, though one of them knew that even by mere playing the innocent may go to heaven. And beneath Brooke's wit was humour—the humour that is cousin to the imagination, smiling magnanimously at the world it loves and understands.

Byron, too, was witty, mocking, enjoyed turning things inside out and wrong side upwards, picking ideas to pieces, shocking the timid, the