same time, been more associatedly active in a finer sense; my own next
apprehension of it at least was in reading the five admirable sonnets
that had been published in "New Numbers" after the departure of his
contingent for the campaign at the Dardanelles. To read these in the
light of one's personal knowledge of him was to draw from them,
inevitably, a meaning still deeper seated than their noble beauty, an
authority, of the purest, attended with which his name inscribes itself
in its own character on the great English scroll. The impression, the
admiration, the anxiety settled immediately--to my own sense at least--
as upon something that would but too sharply feed them, falling in as it
did with that whole particularly animated vision of him of which I have
spoken. He had never seemed more animated with our newest and least
deluded, least conventionalised life and perception and sensibility, and
that formula of his so distinctively fortunate, his overflowing share
in our most developed social heritage which had already glimmered, began
with this occasion to hang about him as one of the aspects, really a
shining one, of his fate.

So I remember irrepressibly thinking and feeling, unspeakably
apprehending, in a word; and so the whole exquisite exhalation of his
own consciousness in the splendid sonnets, attach whatever essentially
or exclusively poetic value to it we might, baffled or defied us as with
a sort of supreme rightness. Everything about him of keenest and
brightest (yes, absolutely of brightest) suggestion made so for his
having been charged with every privilege, every humour, of our merciless
actuality, our fatal excess of opportunity, that what indeed could the
full assurance of this be but that, finding in him the most charming
object in its course, the great tide was to lift him and sweep him away?
Questions and reflections after the fact perhaps, yet haunting for the
time and during the short interval that was still to elapse--when, with