ving crowned reveille with the equal challenge of the last post, how
easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
gorgeous woof.

The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
souls. So the sedge-warbler's

'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'

Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
present on whose pinnacle we stand.

'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.
No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any p