laymate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'

So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer
trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than
our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from
on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit
is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what
undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it
beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the
truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.

'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a peewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dark air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'

Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'

And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the
hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the
line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious
subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and
familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most
apparent in this, that he kno