is present war,
than any other -- more able to express their thoughts of self-surrender,
and with a power to carry comfort to those who watch them so intently
from afar. The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes
and the memory remain; but they will linger.

"During the last few months of his life, months of preparation
in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told
with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die,
and the sure, triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit.
He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England
whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced toward the brink
in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness
of his country's cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellowmen.

"The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable
war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands
of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest,
the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought.
They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself.
Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry
of mind and body, ruled by high, undoubting purpose, he was all
that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice
but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that
which is most freely proffered."

"W. S. C.", as many probably guessed at the time, was the Rt. Hon.
Winston Spencer Churchill, a personal friend and warm admirer of the poet.
Many other tributes followed, notably from an anonymous writer
in the 'Spectator', from Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Edward Thomas,
Mr. Holbrook Jackson, Mr. Jack Collings Squire, Mr. James Douglas,
Mr. Drinkwater, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie.
From most of these writers I have already quoted at some length,
but space must yet be found for the last three, the surviving members
of the brilliant quartette who produced 'New Numbers'. Mr. Drinkwater
wrote as follows: "There can have been no man of his years in England
who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal
to the affection of every one who knew him, while there has not been,
I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death of Shelley.
Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely
to give us any richer memory than his; and th