after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth.  “For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country.”  But all these convictions are useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.  What a worm one is under the cart-wheels—­big, clumsy, careless, lumbering cart-wheels—­of public opinion.  I might have been giving my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity:  instead, I am giving my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most enterprising nation in the world.’

The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written throughout the war.  Sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well.  But he fought in complete and utter detachment.  He died too soon (in October, 1915), to suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of 1917.  There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.

His intellectual evolution went on to the end.  No wonder that he found Rupert Brooke’s sonnets overpraised:—­

’He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice....  It was not that “they” gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet:  but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them.  He has clothed his attitude in fine words:  but he has taken the sentimental attitude.’

Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this criticism of Brooke’s war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one who has given up the search.  ‘There is no such thing as a just war,’ writes this boy.  ‘What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.’  From this position Sorley never flinched.  Never for a moment was he renegade to his generation by taking ‘the sentimental attitude.’  Neither had he in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.

Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last.  We do not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those lost legions is seldom heard.  We can afford, surely, to listen to it to the end.  In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.  After rejecting ‘the actual “Satires of Circumstance"’ as bad poetry, and passing an incisive criticism on ‘Men who March away,’ he continues:—­

’I cannot help thinking that Hardy is the greatest artist of the English character since Shakespeare; and much of The Dynasts (except its historical fidelity) might be Shakespeare.  But I value his lyrics as presenting himself (the self he does not obtrude into the comprehensiveness of his novels and The Dynasts) as truly, and with faults as well as strength visible in it, as any character in his novels.  His lyrics have not the spontaneity of Shakespeare’s or Shelley’s; they are rough-hewn and jagged:  but I like them and they stick.’

A little later, having finished The Egoist,—­