Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/40

34 emphasis and more philosophy. He was never to experience that passing misfortune. He flung himself into the world—of men or of books, of thought and affairs—as a wasp pounces into a cakeshop, Hotspur into the fighting. When his soul flourished on Walter Pater and Aubrey Beardsley, he thought it a waste of time to walk and swim. When, together with meat and alcohol, he gave up these rather rarified dainties, and lived, as it is fabulously reported, on milk and honey, it seemed a waste of time to do anything else. He could not be half-hearted. Indeed, in that "tearing hunger to do things"—working, playing, reading, writing, publishing, travelling, talking, socialism, politics—any one thing seemed a waste of time, because meanwhile the rest of life's feast was kept waiting. "What an incredibly lovely, superb world!" he exclaims. Lovely, superb—what are the precise epithets which we should choose? Again, "it is fun going and making thousands of acquaintances." It must be fun—when you are Rupert Brooke. Frankly, voraciously, that is how he met everything and everybody—from Mrs Grundy to the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty reminds me, vividly and happily, of America. Three years ago, the fact that one of the great American Universities had