Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel.  Grant us “fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea”; or a winding road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village.  Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire.  Let there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog’s nose.  Then may we prop our Bacon’s Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words:  “Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man’s mind move in charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth.” Haec studio, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.

RUPERT BROOKE

Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre.  He was born of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood.  Ruddy skin, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles.  Walsingham, in Norfolk, was the home of the family.  His father was a master at Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.

In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge, England, issued a little anthology called Cambridge Poems 1900-1913.  This volume was my first introduction to Brooke.  As an undergraduate at Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own small versemakings to watch very carefully what the “Tabs” were doing.  His poem The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, reprinted in Heffer’s Cambridge Poems, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14.

Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the Trumpington of Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale.”  All that Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel of King’s clear against the sky.  It is the favourite lament of Cambridge men that their “Umgebung” is so dull and monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.

But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Cafe des Westens in Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed.  Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely.  But the verses are more than of merely passing interest.  To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid.  To me it brings back with painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to