"But the best I've known,
    Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown
    About the winds of the world, and fades from brains
    Of living men, and dies.
                                 Nothing remains."
  
And yet, --
  
    "Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake;"
  
again, --
  
                           "the light,
    Returning, shall give back the golden hours,
    Ocean a windless level. . . ."
  
again, best of all, in the last word, --
  
    "Still may Time hold some golden space
     Where I'll unpack that scented store
    Of song and flower and sky and face,
     And count, and touch, and turn them o'er,
    Musing upon them."
  
He cannot forego his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets". He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering through the night, "alone".  So the faith that broke its chrysalis in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best", beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant with the spirit still unsubdued. --
  
    "Proud, then, clear-eyed and laughing, go to greet
    Death as a friend."
  
So go, "with unreluctant tread".  But in the disillusionment of beauty and of love there is an older tone.  With what bitter savor, with what grossness of diction, caught from the Elizabethan and satirical elements in his culture, he spends anger in words!  He reacts, he rebels, he storms. A dozen poems hardly exhaust his gall.  It is not merely that beauty and joy and love are transient, now, but in their going they are corrupted into their opposites, -- ugliness, pain, indifference. And his anger once stilled by speech, what lassitude follows!

Life, in this volume, is hardly less evident by its ecstasy than by its collapse.  It is a book of youth, sensitive, vigorous, sound; but it is the fruit of intensity, and bears the traits. The search for solitude, the relief from crowds, the open door into nature; the sense of flight and escape; the repeated thought of safety, the insistent fatigue, the cry for sleep; -- all these bear confession in their faces.  "Flight", "Town and Country", "The Voice", are eloquent of what they leave untold; and the climax of "Retrospect", --
  
    "And I should sleep, and I should sleep," --
  
or the sestet of "Waikiki", or the whole fainting sonnet entitled "A Memory", belong to the nadir of vitality.  At moments weariness set in like a spiritual tide.  I associate, too, with such moods, psychologically at least, his visions of the "arrested moment", as in "Dining-Room Tea", -- a sort of trance state -- or in the pendant sonnet. Analogous moods are not infrequent in the great poets.  Rupert Brooke seems to have faltered, nervously, at times; these poems mirror faithfully such moments.  But even when the image of life, imaginative or real, falters so, how essentially vital it still is, and clothed in an exquisite body of words like the traditional "rainbow hues of the dying fish"! For I cannot express too strongly my admiration of the literary sense of this young poet, and my delight in it.  "All these have been my loves," he says, if I may repeat the phrase; but he seems to have loved the words, as much as the things, -- "dear names", he adds.  The born man of letters speaks there.  So, when his pulse is at its lowest, he cannot forget the beautiful surface of his South Sea idyls or of versified English gardens and lanes.  He cared as much for the expression as for the thing, which is what makes a man of letters. So fixed is this habit that his art, truly, is independent of his bodily state.  In his poems of "collapse" as in those of "ecstasy" he seems to me equally master of his mood, -- like those poets who are "for all time".  His literary skill in verse was ripe, how long so ever he might have to live.