ultimate sacrifice of life itself. The poet achieves his highest meed of
contemporary glory, if

"some brave young man's untimely fate
In words worth, dying for he celebrate,"

and when he is himself a young man striving for the same deathless
honour on the same field of blood it is difficult to conceive of
circumstances more poignant than those which surround his effort. On
many of these poets a death of the highest nobility set the seal of
eternal life. They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, they
fought for their country, and they have entered into glory. This alone
might be enough to say in their praise, but star differeth from star in
brightness, and from the constellation I propose to select half a dozen
of the clearest luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these may
be said, with due modification, of many others who miss merely the
polish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps worth noticing, in
passing, that most of the poets are men of university training, and that
certain literary strains are common to the rank and file of them. The
influence of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti is almost
entirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians whom they seem to
have read is Matthew Arnold, but it is impossible to help observing that
the _Shropshire Lad_ of Mr. A.E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket of
every one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is mainly the
so-called "metaphysical" writers in the seventeenth century whom they
studied; Donne seems to have been a favourite with them all, and Vaughan
and Treherne were not far behind.

The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name of Rupert Brooke
to illustrate the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlative
degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks
after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than
that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a
sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment
what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his
country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor
Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as
it seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was a pawn in the
dark and dolorous flight from Antwerp. He died in the AEgean, between
Egypt and Gallipoli, having never seen a Turkish enemy. So Peguy faded
out of