Let me evoke the memory of some of them.  From Balliol have gone the two Grenfell brothers, vehement, powerful souls, by the testimony of those who knew them best, not delightful to those who did not love them, not just, often, to those they did not love, but full of that rich stuff which life matures to all fine uses.  The younger fell in the attack on Hooge, July 31st, last year; the elder, Julian, had fallen some months earlier.  Julian’s verses, composed the night before he was wounded, will be remembered with Rupert Brooke’s sonnets, as expressing the inmost passion of the war in great hearts.  They were written in the spring weather of April, 1915, and a month later the writer had died of his wounds.  With an exquisite felicity and strength the lines run, expressing the strange and tragic joy of the “fighting man” in the spring, which may be his last—­in the night heavens—­in the woodland trees: 

“The woodland trees that stand together
They stand to him each one a friend;
They gently speak in the windy weather;
They guide to valley and ridge’s end.

“The kestrel hovering by day
And the little owls that call by night,
Bid him be swift and keen as they
As keen of ear, as swift of sight.

“The blackbird sings to him, ’Brother, brother,
If this be the last song you shall sing,
Sing well, for you may not sing another
Brother, sing.’

“In dreary, doubtful waiting hours,
Before the brazen frenzy starts,
The horses show him nobler powers;—­
O patient eyes, courageous hearts!

“And when the burning moment breaks,
And all things else are out of mind
And only Joy of Battle takes
Him by the throat and makes him blind

“Through joy and blindness he shall know
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor steel shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.

“The thundering line of battle stands,
And in the air Death moans and sings;
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,
And Night shall fold him in soft wings.”

A young man of another type, inheriting from the Cecils on the one side, and from his grandfather, the first Lord Selborne, on the other, the best traditions of English Conservatism and English churchmanship—­open-eyed, patriotic, devout—­has been lost to the nation in Robert A.S.  Palmer, the second son of Lord and Lady Selborne, affectionately known to an ardent circle of friends whose hopes were set on him, as “Bobbie Palmer.”  He has fallen in the Mesopotamian campaign; and of him, as of William Henry Gladstone, the grandson and heir of England’s great Liberal Minister, who fell in Flanders a year ago, it may be said, as his Oxford contemporaries said of Sir Philip Sidney,

     Honour and Fame are got about their graves,
     And there sit mourning of each other’s loss.