'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that "they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.' Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,' writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect. Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems. After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry, and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he continues:-- 'I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the English character since Shakespeare; and much of _The Dynasts_ (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare. But I value his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into the comprehensiveness of his novels and _The Dynasts_) as truly, and with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in his novels. His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare's or Shelley's; they are rough-hewn and jagged: but I like them and they stick.' A little later, having finished _The Egoist_,-- 'I see now that Meredith belongs to that class of novelists with whom I do not usually get on so well (_e.g._ Dickens), who create and people worlds of their own so that one approaches the characters with amusement, admiration, or contempt, not with liking or pity, as with Hardy's people, into whom the author does not inject his own exaggerated characteristics.' The great Russians were unknown to Sorley when he died. What would he not have found in those mighty seekers, with whom Hardy alone stands equal? But whatever might have been his vicissitudes in that strange company, we feel that Hardy could never have been dethroned in his heart, for other reasons than that the love of the Wessex hills had crept into his blood. He was killed on October 13, 1915, shot in the head by a sniper as he led his company at the 'hair-pin' trench near Hulluch. [JANUARY, 1920. _The Cry in the Wilderness_