He was perhaps, too young to understand two real truths--that real love can exist in the midst of wild passion, and that the best part of it can and often does survive the early flames. Such poems as _Menelaus and Helen_, _Jealousy_, and others, profess a profound knowledge of life that is really a profound ignorance. His pictures of nature, while often beautiful, lack the penetrative quality seen so constantly in Wordsworth and Browning; these greater poets saw nature not only with their eyes, but with their minds. Their representations glow with enduring beauty, but they leave in the spectator something even greater than beauty, something that is food for reflection and imagination, the source of quick-coming fancies. Compare the picture of the pines in Brooke's poem _Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening_, with Browning's treatment of an identical theme in _Paracelsus_, remembering that Browning's lines were written when he was twenty-two years old. Brooke writes, Then from the sad west turning wearily, I saw the pines against the white north sky, Very beautiful, and still, and bending over Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky. Browning writes, The herded pines commune, and have deep thoughts, A secret they assemble to discuss, When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of hell. Both in painting and in imagination the second passage is instantly seen to be superior. The war sonnets of 1914 receive so much additional poignancy by the death of the author that it is difficult, and perhaps undesirable, to judge them as objective works of art. They are essentially noble and sincere, speaking from the depths of high-hearted self-sacrifice. He poured out his young life freely and generously, knowing what it meant to say good-bye to his fancy. There is always something eternally sublime--something that we rightly call divine--in the spendthrift giving of one's life-blood for a great cause. And Rupert Brooke was intensely aware of the value of what he unhesitatingly gave. The two "fish" poems exhibit a playful, charming side to Brooke's imagination; but if I could have only one of his pieces, I should assuredly choose Grantchester. Nostalgia is the mother of much fine poetry; but seldom has the expression of it been mingled more exquisitely with humour and longing. By the rivers of Babylon he sat down and laughed when he remembered Zion. And his laughter at Babylon is so different from his laughter at Grantchester. A few felicitous adjectives sum up the significant difference between Germany and England. Writing in a Berlin café, he says: