_By courtesy of Doubleday, Page & Co._ _Photograph by E. O. Hoppe_ RUDYARD KIPLING] One trait sharply differentiates Kipling from some of his colleagues among the Nobel prize winners. He is a patriot-poet but with less ardent tribute than is found in the verse of Mistral and Björnson and Heidenstam. Perhaps his open criticism of his country in certain political crises has barred him from the laureateship. His frank, democratic attitude in later years, somewhat in contrast with earlier utterances of imperialism, finds expression in every stanza of “A Pilgrim’s Way.” Few poets, however, have written such magnetic lines in urgence of “fitness,” honor and service for country as has Kipling, in the familiar words of “If,” “For All We Have and Are,” “The Children’s Song,” and the refrain in the poem in _Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Scoutmasters_-- Be fit--be fit--for honour’s sake be fit! He is patriotic with the world knowledge of a traveled man; two examples in proof are found in “The Return” and “The English Flag,” with the pertinent query-- And what should they know of England who only England know? In recent years it has been a “fad” in certain journals to depreciate Kipling and to charge against him faults of narrowness in outlook and lack of modernism. Especially during the years of the war and its immediate aftermath one found tones of sad, somewhat cynical writing. In large measure this was due to the personal trials of the time and the loss of his son. That elegiac poem, “My Boy Jack; 1914-1918,” will live as a heart-gripping memorial. In his speech at the Sorbonne, November 19, 1921, he gave evidences of spiritual recovery; he said, “One cannot resume a broken world as easily as one can resume a broken sentence. But before long our sons who have spent themselves in suffering and toiling to abolish the menace of barbarism will recover also from the menace of moral lassitude.” With old-time sprightliness and vigor he wrote, in the spring of 1924, the stanzas “A Song of the French Roads,” after a visit to France and the joyful experience of finding the roads to the border, that had been laid out by Napoleon and devastated by the war, were now repaired and open to traffic.[58]