"W. S. C.", as many probably guessed at the time, was the Rt. Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill, a personal friend and warm admirer of the poet. Many other tributes followed, notably from an anonymous writer in the `Spectator', from Mr. Walter de la Mare, Mr. Edward Thomas, Mr. Holbrook Jackson, Mr. Jack Collings Squire, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Drinkwater, Mr. Gibson, and Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. From most of these writers I have already quoted at some length, but space must yet be found for the last three, the surviving members of the brilliant quartette who produced `New Numbers'.  Mr. Drinkwater wrote as follows:  "There can have been no man of his years in England who had at once so impressive a personality and so inevitable an appeal to the affection of every one who knew him, while there has not been, I think, so grievous a loss to poetry since the death of Shelley. Some of us who knew him may live to be old men, but life is not likely to give us any richer memory than his; and the passion and shapely zest that are in his work will pass safely to the memory of posterity." Mr. Wilfrid Gibson's tribute took the form of a short poem called "The Going":
  
    He's gone.
    I do not understand.
    I only know
    That, as he turned to go
    And waved his hand,
    In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
    And I was dazzled by a sunset glow --
    And he was gone.

Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie, now perhaps the greatest of our younger poets and a warm personal friend of Brooke's, wrote at greater length:

"`And the worst friend and enemy is but Death' . . .  `And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.'  So ended two of the five sonnets, with the common title `1914', which Rupert Brooke wrote while he was in training, between the Antwerp expedition and sailing for the Aegean.  These sonnets are incomparably the finest utterance of English poetry concerning the Great War.  We knew the splendid promise of Rupert Brooke's earlier poetry; these sonnets are the brief perfection of his achievement.  They are much more than that:  they are among the few supreme utterances of English patriotism.  It was natural, perhaps, that they should leave all else that has been written about the war so far behind.  It is not so much that they are the work of a talent scarcely, in its own way, to be equalled to-day; it was much more that they were the work of a poet who had for his material the feeling that he was giving up everything to fight for England -- the feeling, I think, that he was giving his life for England. Reading these five sonnets now, it seems as if he had in them written his own epitaph.  I believe he thought so himself; a few words he said in my last talk with him makes me believe that -- now.  At any rate, the history of literature, so full of Fate's exquisite ironies, has nothing more poignantly ironic, and nothing at the same time more beautifully appropriate, than the publication of Rupert Brooke's noble sonnet-sequence, `1914', a few swift weeks before the death they had imagined, and had already made lovely.  Each one of these five sonnets faces, in a quiet exultation, the thought of death, of death for England; and understands, as seldom even English poetry has understood, the unspeakable beauty of the thought:
  
    "These laid the world away; poured out the red
    Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
     Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene
     That men call age; and those who would have been,
    Their sons, they gave -- their immortality.
  
I am strangely mistaken if the accent of the noblest English poetry does not speak to us in those lines.  And again:
  
    "If I should die, think only this of me:
     That there's some corner of a foreign field
    That is for ever England.  There shall be
     In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
    A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
     Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
    A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
     Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

"This -- this music, this beauty, this courage -- was Rupert Brooke. But it is, we may be sure, his immortality.  It is not yet tolerable to speak of personal loss.  The name seemed to stand for a magical vitality that must be safe -- safe!  Yes, `and if these poor limbs die, safest of all!'  What poetry has lost in him cannot be judged by any one who has not read those last sonnets, now his farewell to England and the world.  I am not underrating the rest of his work. There was an intellectual keenness and brightness in it, a fire of imagery and (in the best sense) wit, the like of which had not been known, or known only in snatches, in our literature since the best days of the later Elizabethans.  And it was all penetrated by a mastering passion, the most elemental of all passions -- the passion for life. `I have been so great a lover,' he cries, and artfully leads us on to think he means the usual passion of a young poet's career. But it is just life he loves, and not in any abstract sense, but all the infinite little familiar details of life catalogued with delighted jest.  This was profoundly sincere:  no one ever loved life more wholly or more minutely.  And he celebrated his love exquisitely, often unforgettably, through all his earlier poetry, getting further intensity from a long sojourn in the South Seas. But this passion for life had never had seriously to fight for its rights and joys.  Like all great lovers of life, he had pleased himself with the thought of death and after death:  not insincerely, by any means, but simply because this gave a finer relish to the sense of being alive. Platonism, which offers delightful games for such subtle wit as his, he especially liked to play with.  It was one more element in the life of here and now, the life of mortal thought and sense and spirit, infinitely varying and by him infinitely loved.  And then came 1914; and his passion for life had suddenly to face the thought of voluntary death.  But there was no struggle; for instantly the passion for life became one with the will to die -- and now it has become death itself.  But first Rupert Brooke had told the world once more how the passion for beautiful life may reach its highest passion and most radiant beauty when it is the determination to die."

                                Margaret Lavington.

London, October, 1915.