Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three years of age, laid the foundation of a lifelong attachment--of which these Soliloquies are a late fruit--to both Oxford and Cambridge: not so much to the learned society of those places as to their picturesque aspects and to the possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense companionship of the past and of the beautiful; also the intense companionship of youth, to which more advanced years in themselves are no obstacle, if the soul remains free. I have never liked the taste of academic straw; but there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at universities, which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated seriousness; and unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it. He added that our ignominious condition forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest. Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as it must appear in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in all to our mortal nature; and whilst intellectually we may judge ourselves somewhat as the gods might judge us, and may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity, our poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of time, which devours us and all our possessions. The artist playing a farce for others suffers a tragedy in himself. When he aspires to shed as much as possible the delusions of earthly passion, and to look at things joyfully and unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is not because he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it should seem inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies whilst Rome was burning, I will transcribe here some desperate verses extorted from me by events during those same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a metrical form, why should they be forbidden to wear it? I do not ask the reader to admire these sonnets, but to believe them. A PREMONITION _Cambridge, October_ 1913 Grey walls, broad fields, fresh voices, rippling weir, I know you well: ten faces, for each face That passes smiling, haunt this hallowed place, And nothing not thrice noted greets me here. Soft watery winds, wide twilight skies and clear, Refresh my spirit at its founts of grace, And a strange sorrow masters me, to pace These willowed paths, in this autumnal year. Soon, lovely England, soon thy secular dreams, Thy lisping comrades, shall be thine no more. A world's loosed troubles flood thy gated streams And drown, methinks, thy towers; and the tears start As if an iron hand had clutched my heart, And knowledge is a pang, like love of yore. THE UNDERGRADUATE KILLED IN BATTLE _Oxford_, 1915