e. Where they breached he broke through and
waved his sword laughing. Where they hurled him back he turned away,
laughing still.

II

Kilmer wrote from France, in answer to an inquiry as to his ideas about
poetry, "All that poetry can be expected to do is to give pleasure of a
noble sort to its readers." He might have said "pleasure or pain of a
noble sort."

It is both pleasure and pain, of a very noble sort, that the reader will
find in Robert Cortes Holliday's memoir, which introduces the two
volumes of Kilmer's poems, essays, and letters. The ultimate and
eloquent tribute to Kilmer's rich, brave, and jocund personality is that
it has raised up so moving a testament of friendship. Mr. Holliday's
lively and tender essay is worthy to stand among the great memorials of
brotherly affection that have enriched our speech. To say that Kilmer
was not a Keats is not to say that the friendship that irradiates Mr.
Holliday's memoir was less lovely than that of Keats and Severn, for
instance. The beauty of any human intercourse is not measured by the
plane on which it moves.

Pleasure and pain of a noble sort are woven in every fibre of this
sparkling casting-up of the blithe years. Pleasure indeed of the
fullest, for the chronicle abounds in the surcharged hilarity and
affectionate humour that we have grown to expect in any matters
connected with Joyce Kilmer. The biographer dwells with loving and
smiling particularity on the elvish phases of the young knight-errant.
It is by the very likeness of his tender and glowing portrait that we
find pleasure overflowing into pain--into a wincing recognition of
destiny's unriddled ways with men. This memory was written out of a full
heart, with the poignance that lies in every backward human gaze. It is
only in the backward look that the landscape's contours lie revealed in
their true form and perspective. It is only when we have lost what was
most dear that we know fully what it meant. That is Fate's way with us:
it cannot be amended.

There will be no need for the most querulous appraiser to find fault
with Mr. Holliday on the score of over-eulogy. He does not try to push
sound carpentry or ready wit into genius. Fortune and his own impetuous
onslaught upon life cast Kilmer into the role of hack journalist: he
would have claimed no other title. Yet he adorned Grub Street (that most
fascinating of all thorny ways) with gestures and music of his own. Out
of his glowing and busy