Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/36

30 boy had turned out the contents of his astonishing pockets just before going to bed. They share them, too, in that queer paradoxical fashion which makes a volume of poems a more secure refuge even than one's lawyer, one's doctor, or a priest.

Many of our fellow-creatures—whether we like or dislike them, approve or disapprove—always remain a little mysterious and problematical. Even when they most frankly express themselves, we are conscious that there is still something in them that eludes us, a dream unshared, a reticence unbroken, a fugitive phantom. Have we, indeed, all of us, to the last dim corner and attic, cellar and corridor, explored ourselves? Because of his very candour, because, so to speak, of what he looked like, this was to some extent true of Rupert Brooke. Age, in time, scrawls our very selves upon our faces. Fast-locked the door of our souls may be, but the key hangs in the porch. But youth and delightful manners may be a mask concealing gravity and deep feeling. And what is one's remembrance of that serenely eager, questing face, stilled, as it were, with the phantom of a smile that might have lingered in the countenance of the Sphinx in her younger days, but that of the very embodiment of youth?