y other young men, to whom the gift of self-expression
has perhaps been denied, the war had a swiftly maturing influence.
Much of the impetuosity of youth fell away from him. The boy who had been
rather proud of his independent views -- a friend relates how
at the age of twelve he sat on the platform at a pro-Boer meeting --
grew suddenly, it seemed, into a man filled with the love of life indeed,
but inspired most of all with the love of England. Fortunately for himself
and for us, Brooke's patriotism found passionate voice in the sonnets
which are rightly given pride of place in the 1914 section of this volume.
Mr. Clement Shorter, who gives us the skeleton of a bibliography
that is all too brief, draws special attention to 'New Numbers',
a quarterly publication issued in Gloucestershire,
to which Brooke contributed in February, April, August, and December
of last year, his fellow poets being Lascelles Abercrombie,
John Drinkwater, and Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. He spent the winter
in training at Blandford Camp in Dorsetshire, and sailed with
the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on the last day of February.
He had a presentiment of his death, but he went, as so many others
have gone,

"Unstumbling, unreluctant, strong, unknowing,
Borne by a will not his, that lifts, that grows,
Sweeps out to darkness, triumphing in his goal,
Out of the fire, out of the little room. . . .
-- There is an end appointed, O my soul!"

He never reached the Dardanelles. He went first to Lemnos
and then to Egypt. Early in April he had a touch of sunstroke
from which he recovered; but he died from blood-poisoning on board
a French hospital ship at Scyros on Friday, April 23rd -- died for England
on the day of St. Michael and Saint George. He was buried at night,
by torchlight, in an olive grove about a mile inland. "If you go there,"
writes Mr. Stephen Graham, "you will find a little wooden cross
with just his name and the date of his birth and his death marked on it
in black." A few days later the news of his death was published
in the 'Times' with the following appreciation:

"W. S. C." writes: "Rupert Brooke is dead. A telegram from the Admiral
at Lemnos tells us that this life has closed at the moment when it seemed
to have reached its springtime. A voice had become audible,
a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice
to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in th