The rhythm, apparently wavering, but in reality very exact, alone reflects in this stanza the sadness which elsewhere in the poem is put more directly. It is a delicate, ingenuous rhythm, suited most admirably to (or rather, perhaps, dictating) the unstrained and easy words. The same mood, the same rhythm, are repeated in a poem in _The Four Men_: "The trees that grow in my own country Are the beech-tree and the yew; Many stand together, And some stand few. In the month of May in my own country All the woods are new." But the summit of these poems is reached in another composition in the same book. He has set it cunningly in a description of the way in which it was written, so as to be able to strew the approaches to it with single lines and fragments which he could not use, but which were too good to be lost. The poem itself runs like this: "He does not die that can bequeath Some influence to the land he knows, Or dares, persistent, interwreath Love permanent with the wild hedgerows; He does not die but still remains Substantiate with his darling plains. The spring's superb adventure calls His dust athwart the woods to flame; His boundary river's secret falls Perpetuate and repeat his name. He rides his loud October sky: He does not die. He does not die. The beeches know the accustomed head Which loved them, and a peopled air Beneath their benediction spread Comforts the silence everywhere; For native ghosts return and these Perfect the mystery in the trees. So, therefore, though myself be crosst The shuddering of that dreadful day When friend and fire and home are lost And even children drawn away-- The passer-by shall hear me still, A boy that sings on Duncton Hill." It is of a robuster sort than the other poems and in a way their climax for it expresses the same emotion. It is indeed the final movement of the book which treats in particular of the love of Sussex, but also of the general emotion of the love of one's own country. There is melancholy mixed with this feeling, as with all strong affections: with it are associated the love of friends and the dread of parting from them and regret for the accomplishment of such a thing. In these few poems, his best, Mr. Belloc seems to have expressed this mood completely and so to have shown--we have said as it were by accident--an abiding and fundamental mood. We have been constrained to criticize his poetry much as he has criticized the poetry of others, that is to say, sporadically and without continuity. But we have touched here perhaps on a thing, the obscure existence of which also we indicated, the secret root that shows his poetry to be a true and native growth of the soil from which his other writings have sprung. CHAPTER V THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS