Nevinson and Mr. Thomas differ in their ideas.
Mr. Edward Marsh, however, Brooke's executor and one of his
closest friends -- indeed the friend of all young poets --
tells me that he was about six feet, so that all doubt on this minor point
may be set at rest.

He had been in Munich, Berlin, and in Italy, and in May, 1913,
he left England again for a wander year, passing through
the United States and Canada on his way to the South Seas.
Perhaps some of those who met him in Boston and elsewhere
will some day contribute their quota to the bright record of his life.
His own letters to the 'Westminster Gazette', though naturally
of unequal merit, were full of humorous delight in the New World.
In one of his travel papers he described the city of Quebec as having
"the radiance and repose of an immortal." "That, in so many words,"
wrote Mr. Walter de la Mare, "brings back his living remembrance. . . .
With him there was a happy shining impression that he might have just come
-- that very moment -- from another planet, one well within
the solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours."
Not even Stevenson, it would seem, excited a greater enthusiasm
among his friends; and between the two men an interesting parallel
might be drawn. Brooke made a pilgrimage to Stevenson's home in Samoa,
and his life in the Pacific found full and happy expression in his verse.
His thoughts, however, turned longingly to England,
the land "where Men with Splendid Hearts may go," and he reappeared
from the ends of the earth among his friends as apparently little changed
"as one who gaily and laughingly goes to bed and gaily and laughingly
comes down next morning after a perfectly refreshing sleep."

Then came the War. "Well, if Armageddon's ON," he said,
"I suppose one should be there." It was a characteristic way
of putting it. He obtained a commission in the Hood Battalion
of the Royal Naval Division in September, and was quickly ordered
on the disastrous if heroic expedition to Antwerp. Here he had
his first experience of war, lying for some days in trenches
shelled by the distant German guns. Then followed a strange retreat
by night along roads lit by the glare of burning towns,
and swarming with pitiful crowds of Belgian refugees.
Yet as Mr. Walter de la Mare said of him, when he returned from Antwerp,
"Ulysses himself at the end of his voyagings was not more quietly
accustomed to the shocks of novelty."

On Brooke, as on man