nt stuff." He took a keen interest
in every form of athletic sport, and played both cricket and football
for the school. Though he afterwards dropped both these games,
he developed as a sound tennis player, was a great walker, and found joy
in swimming, like Byron and Swinburne, especially by night. He delighted
in the Russian ballet and went again and again to a good Revue.

In 1906 he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where he made
innumerable friends, and was considered one of the leading intellectuals
of his day, among his peers being James Elroy Flecker,
himself a poet of no small achievement, who died at Davos
only a few months ago. Mr. Ivan Lake, the editor of the 'Bodleian',
a contemporary at Cambridge, tells me that although the two men
moved in different sets, they frequented the same literary circles.
Brooke, however, seldom, if ever, spoke at the Union,
but was a member of the Cambridge Fabian Society, and held the posts
of Secretary and President in turn. His socialism was accompanied by
a passing phase of vegetarianism, and with the ferment of youth
working headily within him he could hardly escape the charge
of being a crank, but "a crank, if a little thing, makes revolutions,"
and Brooke's youthful extravagances were utterly untinged with decadence.
He took his classical tripos in 1909, and after spending some time
as a student in Munich, returned to live near Cambridge
at the Old Vicarage in "the lovely hamlet, Grantchester." "It was there,"
writes Mr. Raglan H. E. H. Somerset in a letter I am privileged to quote,
"that I used to wake him on Sunday mornings to bathe in the dam
above Byron's Pool. His bedroom was always littered with books,
English, French, and German, in wild disorder. About his bathing
one thing stands out; time after time he would try to dive;
he always failed and came absolutely flat, but seemed to like it,
although it must have hurt excessively." (This was only
when he was learning. Later he became an accomplished diver.)
"Then we used to go back and feed, sometimes in the Orchard and sometimes
in the Old Vicarage Garden, on eggs and that particular brand of honey
referred to in the 'Grantchester' poem. In those days he always dressed
in the same way: cricket shirt and trousers and no stockings; in fact,
'Rupert's mobile toes' were a subject for the admiration of his friends."

Brooke occupied himself mainly with writing. Poems, remarkable for
a happy spontaneity