But what fills one with reverent admiration is that so many of those whose hearts we know have been so cruelly wounded have set up a new and noble precedent in the matter of courage and self-control. They are not shirking any of the duties of life. They are claiming no exemptions on the ground of their sorrow, and they excuse themselves from no duty merely because it would hurt. They wear their hurt gently like a flower in the breast. They carry their sorrow like a coronet. Out from their secret chambers they come, with washen face and brave lips to do their duty and refrain themselves. How beautiful it is! What a fine thing to see! The sorrowing mother of a noble young fellow I am proud to have known, said to a friend recently who was marvelling at her fortitude, "My boy was very brave and I must try to be brave, too, for his sake." Dear, gentle mother! One cannot speak worthily about a spirit so sweet and gracious as that. One can only bow the head and breathe the inward prayer, "God send thee peace, brave heart!" But, surely, to accept sorrow in that fashion is to entertain unawares an angel of God! The feeling which underlies this new etiquette of sorrow with the washen face is not very easily put into words. But it rests, I think, upon the dim sense that the death which ends those young lives on this noble field of battle is something different from the ordinary bleak fact of mortality. If death is ever glorious, it is when it comes to the soldier fighting for a pure and worthy cause. There is something more than sorrow, there is even a quiet and reverent pride in the remembrance that the beloved life was given as "a ransom for many." When one thinks what we are fighting for, one can hardly deny to the fallen the supreme honour of the words "for Christ’s sake." And it is not death to fall so. Rather is it the finding of life larger and more glorious still. It is that that marks the war-mourners of to-day as a caste royal and apart. It is that that moves so many of them by an inward instinct to wear their sorrow royally. Hidden in the heart of their grief is a tender and wistful pride. Lowell has put this feeling into very fine words: "I, with uncovered head, Salute the sacred dead, Who went and who return not-- Say not so. ’Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, But the high faith that fails not by the way. Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave; No bar of endless night exiles the brave, And, to the saner mind, We rather seem the dead that stayed behind."