se who would have been,
Their sons, they gave -- their immortality.

I am strangely mistaken if the accent of the noblest English poetry
does not speak to us in those lines. And again:

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

"This -- this music, this beauty, this courage -- was Rupert Brooke.
But it is, we may be sure, his immortality. It is not yet tolerable
to speak of personal loss. The name seemed to stand for a magical vitality
that must be safe -- safe! Yes, 'and if these poor limbs die,
safest of all!' What poetry has lost in him cannot be judged by any one
who has not read those last sonnets, now his farewell to England
and the world. I am not underrating the rest of his work.
There was an intellectual keenness and brightness in it, a fire of imagery
and (in the best sense) wit, the like of which had not been known,
or known only in snatches, in our literature since the best days of
the later Elizabethans. And it was all penetrated by a mastering passion,
the most elemental of all passions -- the passion for life.
'I have been so great a lover,' he cries, and artfully leads us on
to think he means the usual passion of a young poet's career.
But it is just life he loves, and not in any abstract sense,
but all the infinite little familiar details of life catalogued
with delighted jest. This was profoundly sincere: no one ever loved life
more wholly or more minutely. And he celebrated his love exquisitely,
often unforgettably, through all his earlier poetry,
getting further intensity from a long sojourn in the South Seas.
But this passion for life had never had seriously to fight for
its rights and joys. Like all great lovers of life, he had pleased himself
with the thought of death and after death: not insincerely, by any means,
but simply because this gave a finer relish to the sense of being alive.
Platonism, which offers delightful games for such subtle wit as his,
he especially liked to play with. It was one more element in the life
of here and now, the life of mortal thought and sense and spirit,
infinitely varying and by him inf