Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/38

32 been very difficult for this poet to take cover, to lie low. He came; you saw; he conquered. And after? Like a good child's birthday cake, he was as rich as he looked.

"I never met," wrote to his mother one heaven-sent friend (I mean sent to the outskirts of heaven), "I never met so entirely likeable a chap.... Your son was not merely a genius; what is perhaps more important, he had a charm that was literally like sunshine." Indeed the good things simply softly shimmered out of him—wit, enthusiasm, ideas, raillery, fun, and that sympathetic imagination concerning everybody and everything that he himself said was the artist's one duty. He had, of course, his own terms—critical, and perhaps at times a little exacting. If he suffered a fool, no more than with the rest of his own generation was it with a guileless gladness. He preferred humanity to be not too stiff, not too stupid, and not too dry. Talk he loved; and when he listened, his mind was in his eyes, "tree whispering to tree without wind, quietly." If he hated, if his sensitiveness wholly recoiled, then that emphatically was the end of the matter.

He confronted his fellow-creatures just like the boy he was, ready to face what and who may come without flinching; smiling lip and steady