Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/46

40 across the gulf of these last four years we see him in vividest outline against the gloom. Other poets, beloved of the gods, and not unendeared to humanity, have died young, as did he. Indeed it may be that, however uncompromising the usages of time, every poet, every man in whom burns on a few coals of imagination, "dies young." But no other English poet of his age has given up his life at a moment so signal, so pregnant. This has isolated and set Rupert Brooke apart. No single consciousness can even so much as vaguely realise the sacrifice of mind and hope and aspiration, of life and promise, "lovely and of good report," which this pitiless and abominable war has meant to England and to the world. His sacrifice was representative. The "incantation of his verse" quickened "a new birth," his words were "sparks among mankind."

What place in English literature the caprices of time and taste will at length accord him does not concern us. Let us in our thoughts be as charitable as we can to our posterity, who will have leisure for judgment, and can confer that remembrance which fleeting humanity flatters in the term "immortality."

I saw him beat the surges under him,

And ride upon their backs...