the sudden news that he _had_ met his doom, an irrepressible "of
course, of course!" contributed its note well-nigh of support. It was as
if the peculiar richness of his youth had itself marked its limit, so
that what his own spirit was inevitably to feel about his "chance"--
inevitably because both the high pitch of the romantic and the ironic
and the opposed abyss of the real came together in it--required, in the
wondrous way, the consecration of the event. The event came indeed not
in the manner prefigured by him in the repeatedly perfect line, that of
the received death-stroke, the fall in action, discounted as such; which
might have seemed very much because even the harsh logic and pressure of
history were tender of him at the last and declined to go through more
than the form of their function, discharging it with the least violence
and surrounding it as with a legendary light. He was taken ill, as an
effect of blood-poisoning, on his way from Alexandria to Gallipoli, and,
getting ominously and rapidly worse, was removed from his transport to a
French hospital ship, where, irreproachably cared for, he died in a few
hours and without coming to consciousness. I deny myself any further
anticipation of the story to which further noble associations attach,
and the merest outline of which indeed tells it and rounds it off
absolutely as the right harmony would have it. It is perhaps even a
touch beyond any dreamt-of harmony that, under omission of no martial
honour, he was to be carried by comrades and devoted waiting sharers,
whose evidence survives them, to the steep summit of a Greek island of
infinite grace and there placed in such earth and amid such beauty of
light and shade and embracing prospect as that the fondest reading of
his young lifetime could have suggested nothing better. It struck us at
home, I mean, as symbolising with the last refinement his whole instinct
of selection and response, his relation to the overcharged appeal of his
scene and hour. How could he have shown more the young English poetic
possibility and faculty in which we were to seek the freshest reflection