of the latest poetry, up to the moment of the outbreak
of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with natural piety, given somewhat
in excess to description of landscape, tender in feeling, essentially
unaggressive except towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of
an earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in any one of
the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous defiance which marked
German verse during the same years. These English shepherds might hit at
their elders with their staves, but they had turned their swords into
pruning-hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point which
might have attracted notice, if we had not all been too drowsy in the
lap of our imperial prosperity to observe the signs of the times in
Berlin. Why did no one call our attention to the beating of the big drum
which was going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all events,
there was no echo of such a noise in the "chambers of imagery" which
contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or in Mr. W.H. Davies' wandering "songs
of joy," or on "the great hills and solemn chanting seas" where Mr. John
Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And the guns of August 1914
found Mr. W.W. Gibson encompassed by "one dim, blue infinity of starry
peace." There is a sort of German _Georgian Poetry_ in existence; in
time to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. Marsh may throw
a side-light on the question, Who prepared the War?

The youngest poets were more completely taken by surprise in August 1914
than their elders. The earliest expressions of lyric military feeling
came from veteran voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all
should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the
prophecy:--

"Much suffering shall cleanse thee!
But thou through the flood
Shalt win to Salvation,
To Beauty through blood."

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first terrific and
bewildering weeks, much was happening that called forth with the utmost
exuberance the primal emotions of mankind; there was full occasion for

"exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind."

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our national veteran, Mr.
Thomas Hardy, with his _Song of the Soldiers_:--

"What of the faith and fire within us,
Men who march away
Ere the barn-cocks say
Night is growing gray,
To hazards whence