old discrimination quite drops to the ground--in which we neither on
the one hand miss anything that the general association could have given
it, nor on the other recognise the pomp that attends the grand
exceptions I have mentioned.

Rupert Brooke, young, happy, radiant, extraordinarily endowed and
irresistibly attaching, virtually met a soldier's death, met it in the
stress of action and the all but immediate presence of the enemy; but he
is before us as a new, a confounding and superseding example altogether,
an unprecedented image, formed to resist erosion by time or
vulgarisation by reference, of quickened possibilities, finer ones than
ever before, in the stuff poets may be noted as made of. With twenty
reasons fixing the interest and the charm that will henceforth abide in
his name and constitute, as we may say, his legend, he submits all
helplessly to one in particular which is, for appreciation, the least
personal to him or inseparable from him, and he does this because, while
he is still in the highest degree of the distinguished faculty and
quality, we happen to feel him even more markedly and significantly
"modern." This is why I speak of the mixture of his elements as new,
feeling that it governs his example, put by it in a light which nothing
else could have equally contributed--so that Byron for instance, who
startled his contemporaries by taking for granted scarce one of the
articles that formed their comfortable faith and by revelling in almost
everything that made them idiots if he himself was to figure as a child
of truth, looks to us, by any such measure, comparatively plated over
with the impenetrable rococo of his own day. I speak, I hasten to add,
not of Byron's volume, his flood and his fortune, but of his really
having quarrelled with the temper and the accent of his age still more
where they might have helped him to expression than where he but flew in
their face. He hugged his pomp, whereas our unspeakably fortunate young