eyan union with the most intimate, the most
inexpressible things in nature that is revealed in such a note as the
following: 'A nameless day, a day without form, yet a day in which the
Spring most mysteriously begins to stir. Warm air in the lengthening
days; a sudden softening, a weakening of nature.' In describing this
atmosphere, this too sudden softness, he uses a word frequent in the
vocabulary of Shelley--'fainting.' In truth, like the great English
poet, whom he seems not to have known, he seeks from the beauty of
things a faculty of self-forgetfulness in lyrical poetry, an
inexpressible and blissful passing of the poet's being into the thing he
contemplates. What he makes his own in the course of those weeks, what
he remembers afterwards, and what he would recall, never to lose it
again, is the culminating moment in which he has achieved
self-forgetfulness and reached the ineffable. The simplest of natural
objects is able to yield him such a moment; see, for instance, this
abrupt intuition: 'I had lapsed from my former sense of the benediction
of God, when suddenly the beauty--all the beauty--of a certain tree
spoke to my inmost heart; and then I understood that an instant of such
contemplation is the whole of life.' And still more continuous, still
more vibrant, is at times his emotion, as when the bow draws out to the
utmost a long ecstatic tone from a sensitive violin. 'What joy is this
perpetual thrill in the heart of Nature! That same horizon of which I
had watched the awakening, I saw last night bathe itself in rosy light;
and then the full moon went up into a tender sky, fretted by coral and
saffron trees.' It is very nearly ecstasy with him in that astonishing
Christmas night which no one then at the front can ever forget--a solemn
night, a blue night, full of stars and of music, when the order and the
divine unity of the universe stood revealed to the eyes of men who, free
for a moment from the dream of hatred and of blood, raised one chant
along six miles, 'hymns, hymns, from end to end.'

Of the carnage in February there are a few precise notes, sufficient to
suggest the increasing horror. The narrative grows quicker; the reader
is aware of the pulse and the impetus of action, the imperious summons
of duty; the young sergeant is in charge of men, and has to execute
terrible tasks. But ever across the tumult and the slaughter, there are
moments of recollection and of compassion; and, in the evening of a