Page:Some soldier poets.djvu/115

Rh and all the commonplaces of poetry with such profusion! Were but the young women addressed, ever qualified by an adjective proper to some one girl! No, Alan Seeger is alone felt, with this delightful freshness, a presence, an inspiration!

"I could accuse myself of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. . . . We are arrant knaves all"—in speaking thus was Hamlet so certainly mad as this sonnet implies? The worry and stress that "honesty of purpose and intellectual honesty" cost Grenfell are remembered with regret.

He is too eager, too arrogant, to await the visit of those wonders which steal unsought into consciousness. A "wise passiveness" was no mood of his. His ambition emulates Byron's, who hated to think himself a mere poet Rh