h sparkling
deference, to people less gifted than himself if only they had
experience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state, bewitched with
wonder and appreciation. His very fine appearance, which seemed to glow
with dormant vitality, his beautiful manners, the quickness of his
intelligence, his humour, were combined under the spell of a curious
magnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room, he seemed to
bring sunshine with him, although he was usually rather silent, and
pointedly immobile. I do not think it would be easy to recollect any
utterance of his which was very remarkable, but all he said and did
added to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect.

There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke which can be
definitely identified with the war. The last six months of his life,
spent in conditions for which nothing in his previous existence in
Cambridge or Berlin, in Grantchester or Tahiti, had in the least
prepared him, were devoted--for we must not say wasted--to breaking up
the _cliche_ of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there remain
to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the crown of Rupert Brooke's
verse, and his principal legacy to English literature. Our record would
be imperfect without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed of
these:--

"Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old,
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
These laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

"Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth,
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth,
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we have come into our heritage."

If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans, it is more
than probable that Rupert Brooke would have become an enlightened and
enthusiastic professor. Of the poet who detains us next it may be said
that there was hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which he
could not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet almost by
accident, resembled the most enlightened of the young Italian noblemen
of the Renaissance, wh