paternal earth, Tennant suggests to us the possibility that a talent of
very high order was quenched by death, because in few of them do we find
so much evidence of that "perception and awe of Beauty" which Plotinus
held to be the upward path to God.

In June 1917 there was published a slender volume which is in several
ways the most puzzling and the most interesting of all that lie upon my
table to-day. This is the _Ardours and Endurances_ of Lieut. Robert
Nichols. I knew nothing of the author save what I learned from his
writings, that he is very young, that he went out from Oxford early in
the war, that he was fighting in Flanders before the end of 1914, that
he was wounded, perhaps at Loos, in 1915, and that he was long in
hospital. I felt the hope, which later information has confirmed, that
he was still alive and on the road to recovery. Before _Ardours and
Endurances_ reached me, I had met with _Invocation_, a smaller volume
published by Lieut. Nichols in December 1915. There has rarely been a
more radical change in the character of an artist than is displayed by a
comparison of these two collections. _Invocation_, in which the war
takes a small and unconvincing place, is creditable, though rather
uncertain, in workmanship, and displays a tendency towards experiment in
rich fancy and vague ornament. In _Ardours and Endurances_ the same
accents are scarcely to be detected; the pleasant boy has grown into a
warworn man; while the mastery over the material of poetic art has
become so remarkable as to make the epithet "promising" otiose. There is
no "promise" here; there is high performance.

Alone among the poets before me, Lieut. Nichols has set down a reasoned
sequence of war impressions. The opening Third of his book, and by far
its most interesting section, consists of a cycle of pieces in which the
personal experience of fighting is minutely reported, stage by stage. We
have "The Summons," the reluctant but unhesitating answer to the call in
England, the break-up of plans; then the farewell to home, "the place of
comfort." "The Approach," in three successive lyrics, describes the
arrival at the Front. "Battle," in eleven sections, reproduces the
mental and physical phenomena of the attack. "The Dead," in four
instalments, tells the tale of grief. "The Aftermath," with
extraordinary skill, records in eight stages the gradual recovery of
nerve-power after the shattering emotions of the right. The first
section