The poet loves his new-found element. He clings to mortality; to life, not thought; or, as he puts it, to the concrete, -- let the abstract "go pack!" "There's little comfort in the wise," he ends. But in the unfolding of his precocious spirit, the literary control comes uppermost; his boat, finding its keel, swings to the helm of mind. How should it be otherwise for a youth well-born, well-bred, in college air? Intellectual primacy showed itself to him in many wandering "loves", fine lover that he was; but in the end he was an intellectual lover, and the magnet seems to have been especially powerful in the ghosts of the men of "wit", Donne, Marvell -- erudite lords of language, poets in another world than ours, a less "ample ether", a less "divine air", our fathers thought, but poets of "eternity". A quintessential drop of intellect is apt to be in poetic blood. How Platonism fascinates the poets, like a shining bait! Rupert Brooke will have none of it; but at a turn of the verse he is back at it, examining, tasting, refusing. In those alternate drives of the thought in his South Sea idyl (clever as tennis play) how he slips from phenomenon to idea and reverses, happy with either, it seems, "were t'other dear charmer away". How bravely he tries to free himself from the cling of earth, at the close of the "Great Lover"! How little he succeeds! His muse knew only earthly tongues, -- so far as he understood. Why this persistent cling to mortality, -- with its quick-coming cry against death and its heaped anathemas on the transformations of decay? It is the old story once more: -- the vision of the first poets, the world that "passes away". The poetic eye of Keats saw it, -- "Beauty that must die, And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu." The reflective mind of Arnold meditated it, -- "the world that seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." -- So Rupert Brooke, -- "But the best I've known, Stays here, and changes, breaks, grows old, is blown About the winds of the world, and fades from brains Of living men, and dies. Nothing remains." And yet, -- "Oh, never a doubt but somewhere I shall wake;" again, -- "the light, Returning, shall give back the golden hours, Ocean a windless level. . . ." again, best of all, in the last word, -- "Still may Time hold some golden space Where I'll unpack that scented store Of song and flower and sky and face, And count, and touch, and turn them o'er, Musing upon them."