’I have mislaid the key.  I sniff the spray
  And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
  Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
  For what I should, yet never can, remember. 
  No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
  Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
  Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.’

So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out.  We come no longer trailing clouds of glory.  We are that which we are, less and more than our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less.  Yet our chosen spirit is not wholly secure in his courage.  He longs not merely to know in what undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it beautiful.  Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.

  ’This heart, some fraction of me, happily
  Floats through the window even now to a tree
  Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
  Not like a peewit that returns to wail
  For something it has lost, but like a dove
  That slants unswerving to its home and love. 
  There I find my rest, and through the dark air
  Flies what yet lives in me.  Beauty is there.’

Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of man’s being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.  Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home indeed.  But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither.  That which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other stars has in it any charity.  We may be, we are, the children of the universe; but we have ‘neither father nor mother nor any playmate.’

And Edward Thomas knew this.  The knowledge should be the common property of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from what will come after.  We believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his contemporaries.  He is their chief.  He challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls.  Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and familiar paths?  The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his home no home at all.

  ’This is my grief.  That land,
  My home, I have never seen. 
  No traveller tells of it,
  However far he has been.