gaiety--made each part of his rich consciousness, so rapidly acquired,
cling, as it were, to the company of all the other parts, so as at once
neither to miss any touch of the luck (one keeps coming back to that),
incurred by them, or to let them suffer any want of its own rightness.
It was as right, through the spell he cast altogether, that he should
have come into the world and have passed his boyhood in that Rugby home,
as that he should have been able later on to wander as irrepressibly as
the spirit moved him, or as that he should have found himself fitting as
intimately as he was very soon to do into any number of the
incalculabilities, the intellectual at least, of the poetic temperament.
He had them all, he gave himself in his short career up to them all--and
I confess that, partly for reasons to be further developed, I am unable
even to guess what they might eventually have made of him; which is of
course what brings us round again to that view of him as the young poet
with absolutely nothing but his generic spontaneity to trouble about,
the young poet profiting for happiness by a general condition
unprecedented for young poets, that I began by indulging in. He went
from Rugby to Cambridge, where, after a while, he carried off a
Fellowship at King's, and where, during a short visit there in "May
week," or otherwise early in June 1909, I first, and as I was to find,
very unforgettingly, met him. He reappears to me as with his felicities
all most promptly divinable, in that splendid setting of the river at
the "backs"; as to which indeed I remember vaguely wondering what it was
left to such a place to do with the added, the verily wasted, grace of
such a person, or how even such a person could hold his own, as who
should say, at such a pitch of simple scenic perfection. Any difficulty
dropped, however, to the reconciling vision; for that the young man was
publicly and responsibly a poet seemed the fact a little over-
officiously involved--to the promotion of a certain surprise (on one's
own part) at his having to "be" anything. It was to come over me still