The passion of man for his country which makes death in her defence a high honor burns in Vernede’s "Petition"—a prayer that was granted: "Grant thou one thing more; That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor, Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy England, for thee to die." It must be a deep instinct, not to be judged by finite tests, that sent the young men to battle with joyous hearts and shining faces. "Now God be thanked that has matched us with His hour!" cried Rupert Brooke, now asleep in Scyros in the far Aegean seas. And the stoicism with which the young soldier foresaw death on the battlefield was never expressed in finer terms than by the British officer in the letter which he wrote to his parents the night before his death: "It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual but a member of a regiment and an army. I have been looking at the stars and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems hardly worth talking about!" Here are four voices, all now from the shades! Do they not, taken together, tell us something of the high exaltation with which the young hero makes his sacrifice. He welcomes the hour that makes his arms his country’s shield, scorning the recreant who shuns the test; and measuring time by eternity he renounces life as a garment to be laid aside. If the poet and the seer can speak for them, the lost do not ask us for pity or for hopeless grief: "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun in the morning We will remember them." For those who mourn for the unreturning brave there are secret springs of consolation! The ending of the full-lived life is not tragic; the symbol of poignant grief is the broken column that bespeaks the day that ended in the morning. But for those who die for their country there is not this sense of irremediable loss, this feeling of the unlived life, the unfulfilled dream. There is an instinct deep-hidden in human life which tells the mourner that for the man who falls upon the field of honor his life has come full circle whatever the tale of his years; and that somewhere in the divine scheme of things there is compensation for the lost experiences and achievements.