Not to many is given so clear a soul as this, so fine a spirit. Peace and loveliness be with him, and with all who die like him before their time, following the light within them. And with all who live on in this world of beauty, where the Dead harm not the Spring, may there be—in his words—the longing for pity, fraternity, and goodness! TOTALLY DISABLED (From _The Observer_, 1916.) If I were that! Not as one getting into the yellow leaf, but with all the Spring-running in me. If I lay, just turning my eyes here and there! How should I feel? How do _they_ feel—those helpless soldiers and sailors already lying in the old ball-room of the “Star and Garter”? In that hospital ward, a ghostly officer is ever crying: “Stick it, men! Stick it! Only for life! Stick it!” Only for life—how many years! In the year only three hundred and sixty-five awakenings; only all those returns from merciful sleep! “Stick it, men! Stick it!” Totally disabled—incurably helpless! No! One can’t realize what it feels like to be caught young and strong in such a net; to be caught—not for your own folly and excesses, not through accident or heredity, but as reward for giving yourself body and soul to your country. Better so, more easily borne; and yet how much more ironically tragic! Who knows what the freedom of limbs means, till he has lost it? Who can measure the ecstasy of vigour, till every power of movement has been cut off? Who really grasps what it’s like to lie like a log dependent for everything on others, save those who have to? Think of the trout in the streams, of the birds of the air, the winged creatures innumerable, think of each beast and creeping thing—can one even imagine them without movement? Men, also, are meant to be free of their world, masters of their limbs and senses. They who lie helpless are no longer quite bodies, for the essence of body is movement; already they are almost spirits. It is as if, in passing, one looked at minds, nearly all in the heyday of consciousness and will.