of "Battle," as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted in
full as an example of Lieut. Nichols's method:--

"It is mid-day: the deep trench glares--
A buzz and blaze of flies--
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs,
The great sun rakes the skies,

"No sound in all the stagnant trench
Where forty standing men
Endure the sweat and grit and stench,
Like cattle in a pen.

"Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs
Or twangs the whining wire;
Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs
As in hell's forging fire.

"From out a high cool cloud descends
An aeroplane's far moan;
The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends,
The black speck travels on.

"And sweating, dizzied, isolate
In the hot trench beneath,
We bide the next shrewd move of fate
Be it of life or death."

This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy by what
follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in all literature, from
the wail of David over Jonathan downward, such an expression of the
hopeless longing for an irrecoverable presence as informs the broken
melodies, the stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of
_Ardours and Endurances_:--

"In a far field, away from England, lies
A Boy I friended with a care like love;
All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries,
The melancholy clouds drive on above.

"There, separate from him by a little span,
Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free,
Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man,
One with these elder knights of chivalry."

It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to intrude upon,
such passionate grief. These poems form a revelation of the agony of a
spirit of superabundant refinement and native sensuousness suddenly
stunned, and as it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual
anguish. If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of
"Aftermath," where the pain of the soul is abated, and where the poet,
scarred and shattered, but "free at last," snaps the chain of despair,
these poems would be positively intolerable.

In the closeness of his analysis and in the accurate heaping up of exact
and pregnant observations, Lieut. Nichols comes closer than any other of
these English poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I wrote
in _Three French Moralists_. One peculiarity which he shares with them
is h