Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/43

Rh knew Brooke's poetry not by hearsay, but by heart. "I dutifully belong," she writes, "to the English-speaking Unions, and am properly interested in various schemes for making the relations between England and America closer. But I may say this to you—I don't want the alliance to result in the least Americanizing of England. I want England to remain 'like her mother who died yesterday';" (she is quoting Edward Thomas, rare poet and rarest friend). "We over here," she continues, "can't have all the simple, lovely and solitary things of which Englishmen write. It helps so much to be able to think of them as they are in England." These are the words of a devotee of England—such devotees as poetry makes and keeps.

But such were the friends that Brooke himself with his poetry, personality and happiness made wherever he went. "Happy," indeed, is the refrain that runs through all his letters. And then, at length, when on his way to the last great adventure of all: "I have never," he writes, "I have never been so pervasively happy in my life." That is how he opened the door into one's life, and came in. But behind all that we say or do, behind even what we think, is the solitude wherein dwells what we are: and to that solitude he was no stranger, even though it was not what