Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/33

Rh transcendental, the spinners of cocoons; but Brooke, unlike Byron, was never sourly sardonic, never morbidly cynical. Simply because lie was always testing, analysing, examining, with an intellect bordering as close on his emotions as his emotions bordered on his intellect, he was, again, in Mr Marsh's words, self-conscious, self-examining, self-critical, but never self-absorbed; never an ice-cold egotist, that is, however insistent he may be on his own individuality. More closely than Byron he resembles Mercutio:

And in his metaphysical turns, his waywardness, his contradictoriness, his quick revulsions of feeling, he reminds us not less—he reminded even himself (in a moment of exultation)—of the younger Donne.

Though "magic" in the accepted sense is all but absent from his verse—the magic that transports the imagination clean into another