And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger--a quartette of immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland, "faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough to save the world. THE GOSPEL OF FRIENDSHIP Among the few definite, outstanding gospels that Brooke preached is seen the gospel of friendship. In "The Jolly Company" he says: "O white companionship! You only In love, in faith unbroken dwell, Friends, radiant and inseparable!" "Light-hearted and glad they seemed to me And merry comrades, even so God out of heaven may laugh to see.--" The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. Then, again, in a poem which he called "Lines Written in the Belief That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia," he voices in an even more striking quatrain the immortality of friendship. What a thrill of hope runs through us here as we, who believe that life brings no richer gold than friendship, read this poet's thought that friendship too shall last beyond the years! "And I know, one night, on some far height, In the tongue I never knew, I yet shall hear the tidings clear From them that were friends of you.--" The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. THE GOSPEL OF LOVE And where Friendship sweeps into love who shall tell, or where the dividing line is? But while Brooks lived he forgot not love. His was a throbbing, beating love whose light was a beacon night and day; a beacon of which he was not ashamed. He set the fires of romantic love burning and when he went away he left them burning so that their light might light the way for other poets and other lovers and other travelers when they came. He believed, like Noyes, that love should not be weak; that that was the great hope. Noyes said: "But one thing is needful, and ye shall be true To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek; Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you If ye love one another if your love be not weak." From Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes. Now I do not mean to suggest that the love that Brooke sang was exactly the type that Noyes sang in these four lines. In fact, one feels a difference as he reads the two English poets, but they are alike in that each agreed that Love should not be weak, whatever it was. Brooke sang of romantic love, high and holy as that is; love of Youth for Maiden, lad for lass, and man for woman; and thank God for the high clean song that he gave to it in such lines as in "The Great Lover":