we will turn from them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of the soul.  By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to tremble on the edge of our minds.  We shall reach back, under its spell, beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will have become a part of history, to something less solid and more permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb.

   [Footnote 2:  Last Poems.  By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]

Our consciousness will have its record.  The tradition of England in battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be compassed about by a crowd of witnesses.  But it might so nearly have been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the conclusions of our consciousness.  The subtler faiths might so easily have fled through our harsh fingers.  When the sound of the bugles died, having crowned reveille with the equal challenge of the last post, how easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of which it is composed.  The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself crumbles into dust—­this very texture of the life of the soul might have been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more gorgeous woof.

The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away.  To exacter knowledge less charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard; beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our souls.  So the sedge-warbler’s

  ’Song that lacks all words, all melody,
  All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
  Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.’

Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead poet.  We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been, both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age.  Because he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet.  They made the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind’s ideals, whether of beauty or goodness.  Not to something above but to something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.  But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly into ‘the dark backward and abysm’ not of time, but of the eternal present on whose pinnacle we stand.