Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/26

xxii the classes of the years of the Civil War were passing—so few of those who graduated then had survived! But the youth we have lost in these dread years has not perished in vain; if "the spring has gone out of the year," as Pericles lamented, yet we are immeasurably the richer for the spirituality they have bequeathed to us, of which the poems in this book are an enduring expression. The time has not yet come to estimate the influence of their work on English literature in the nearer and further future. It may well be that the saying of one of the least conventional of them—

may be fulfilled in ways undreamed of. For the most part they have preferred stare super antiquas vias; to keep to conventional forms (such as the sonnet) and to use the traditional currency of thought even when they were thinking in a new way. There are not wanting those who have fashioned new bottles for the new wine of aspiration; some of these voices indeed cry aloud from the "battered trenches" against the established order of things. Some of them hope, when the "Red war is a dim rose in time," to create out of passion in retrospect poems that shall be nobler and more heartening than those wrought of too immediate passion. May they live long and labour to that high end! All of them, as I know well, hope to rebuild our shattered national life so that it may be better worth fighting for. It is with sword and lyre that every new city nearer and yet nearer to the very Civitas Dei must be builded up. In the new sense of comradeship, which is the secret of our victorious warfare, and is an