We hold our hate too choice a thing
For light and careless lavishing.

We cannot, dare not, make it cheap!
For holy uses will we keep.
A thing so pure, a thing so great
As Heaven's benignant gift of hate.

Is there no ancient, sceptred Wrong?
No torturing Power, endured too long?
Yea; and for these our hatred shall
Be cloistered and kept virginal.

He found occasion to draw from his cold storage of hate much sooner
than he had anticipated. Being a convinced anti-imperialist, and
having not a spark of antagonism to Germany, the early days of August,
1914, shocked no one in the world more than him. But after the first
maze of bewilderment and horror, he drew his pen against the Kaiser in
holy wrath. Most of his war poems have been collected in the little
volume _The Man Who Saw,_ published in the summer of 1917. He has
now at all events one satisfaction, that of being in absolute harmony
with the national sentiment. In his Preface, after commenting on the
pain he had suffered in times past at finding himself in opposition to
the majority of his countrymen, he manfully says, "During the present
war, with all its agonies and horrors, he has had at any rate the one
private satisfaction of feeling not even the most momentary doubt or
misgiving as to the perfect righteousness of his country's cause.
There is nothing on earth of which he is more certain than that this
Empire, throughout this supreme ordeal, has shaped her course by the
light of purest duty." The volume opens with a fine tribute to Mr.