initiational stage of these latest years, the informed and animated, the
so consciously non-benighted, geniality of which was to make him the
clearest and most projected poetic case, with the question of difficulty
and doubt and frustration most solved, the question of the immediate and
its implications most in order for him, that it was possible to
conceive. He had found at once to his purpose a wondrous enough old
England, an England breaking out into numberless assertions of a new
awareness, into liberties of high and clean, even when most sceptical
and discursive, young intercourse; a carnival of half anxious and half
elated criticism, all framed and backgrounded in still richer
accumulations, both moral and material, or, as who should say,
pictorial, of the matter of course and the taken for granted. Nothing
could have been in greater contrast, one cannot too much insist, to the
situation of the traditional lonely lyrist who yearns for connections
and relations yet to be made and whose difficulty, lyrical, emotional,
personal, social or intellectual, has thereby so little in common with
any embarrassment of choice. The author of the pages before us was
perhaps the young lyrist, in all the annals of verse, who, having the
largest luxury of choice, yet remained least "demoralised" by it--how
little demoralised he was to round off his short history by showing.

It was into these conditions, thickening and thickening, in their
comparative serenity, up to the eleventh hour, that the War came
smashing down; but of the basis, the great garden ground, all green and
russet and silver, all a tissue of distinguished and yet so easy
occasions, so improvised extensions, which they had already placed at
his service and that of his extraordinarily amiable and constantly
enlarged "set" for the exercise of _their_ dealing with the rest of
the happy earth in punctuating interludes, it is the office of our few
but precious documents to enable us to judge. The interlude that here