And turn, and toss your brown delightful head Amusedly, among the ancient Dead. There are about eighteen words in this one sonnet chosen with infinite pains; and yet the effect of the whole is quite unlabored--an effect of spontaneity reduced to its simplest terms. Perhaps the point can be made more emphatically by a miscellaneous quotation of single lines, because the poignancy of Rupert Brooke's phrasing leaves me in a torment of inexpressiveness, forced to quote him rather than talk about him. Here are a few: "Like hills at noon or sunlight on a tree"; "And dumb and mad and eyeless like the sky"; "The soft moan of any grey-eyed lute-player"; "Some gaunt eventual limit of our light"; "Red darkness of the heart of roses"; "And long noon in the hot calm places"; "My wild sick blasphemous prayer"; "Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming"; "Against the black and muttering trees"; "And quietness crept up the hill"; "When your swift hair is quiet in death"; "Savage forgotten drowsy hymns"; "And dance as dust before the sun"; "The swift whir of terrible wings"; "Like flies on the cold flesh"; "Clear against the unheeding sky"; "So high a beauty in the air"; "Amazed with sorrow"; "Haggard with virtue"; "Frozen smoke"; "Mist-garlanded," and a thousand other things that somehow have a fashion of striking twelve. There's a long poem about a fish, beginning In a cool curving world he lies And ripples with dark ecstasies. that flashes through every tone of the stream's "drowned colour" from "blue brilliant from dead starless skies" to "the myriad hues that lie between darkness and darkness." And there's one about Menelaus and Helen containing this description: High sat white Helen, lonely and serene. He had not remembered that she was so fair, And that her neck curved down in such a way; The simplicity of that last line--but what a picture it is! The important things about Mr. Brooke, however--and of course this should have been said in the first paragraph--are his sense of life and his feeling for nature. Of the first it might be said that he is strong and radiant and sure--and at the same time reverently impotent. _The Hill_, which I like better than anything in this collection, will illustrate: Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass. You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, When we are old, are old...." "And when we die All's over that is ours; and life burns on Through other lovers, other lips," said I, --"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!"