story once more: -- the vision of the first poets,
the world that "passes away". The poetic eye of Keats saw it, --

"Beauty that must die,
And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."

The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it, --

"the world that seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." --

So Rupert Brooke, --

"But the best I've known,
Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
Of living men, and dies.
Nothing remains."

And yet, --

"Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake;"

again, --

"the light,
Returning, shall give back the golden hours,
Ocean a windless level. . . ."

again, best of all, in the last word, --

"Still may Time hold some golden space
Where I'll unpack that scented store
Of song and flower and sky and face,
And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
Musing upon them."

He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets".
He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering
through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis
in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best",
beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant
with the spirit still unsubdued. --

"Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
Death as a friend."

So go, "with unreluctant tread". But in the disillusionment of beauty
and of love there is an older tone. With what bitter savor, with what
grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements
in his culture, he spends anger in words! He reacts, he rebels, he storms.
A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall. It is not merely
that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going
they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference.
And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!

Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy
than by its collapse. It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound;
but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits.
The search for solitude, the relief from crowds