286 ENGLISH SAGA

many: he was not even wholly typical of those he came to
embody. But the direct appeal of his poetry, the beauty of his
appearance and the romance of his brief life caught the imagina-
tion of a wider circle than those who ordinarily read poetry.
Even before the tempest burst and the publication of his 1914
sonnets took reading England by storm, he was known to many
as the personification of a new kind of youth, careless of appear-
ances, generous, out-spoken, almost Elizabethan in its uncal-
culating love of adventure, spiritual and physical. The dedication
to death of one so much in love with life became momentarily
the symbol of a whole generation's sacrifice. In the mood of
1914 he was youth going down with touched lips into the shadows
• as an earnest of a nobler and a happier life for all men in the
years to come.

A greater poet than Brooke and a greater Englishman was
Julian GrenfdL A fine scholar and a brilliant athlete, born to
all the worldly gifts that any man could inherit, his sympathies
—at a time when such sympathies were still unusual and regarded
with disfavour-—were always with the revolutionary, the crank
and the under-dog. It was not that he rebelled against order but
that he instinctively comprehended the causes of his age's dis-
content. A professional soldier before the war, he embraced the
call to arms as a crusade—not so much against the German
people or even their tiresome rulers as against the inertia and
death that seemed to have fallen on the world. After enduring
with astonishing happiness and cheerfulness the first harsh
winter in the trenches, he fell in the spring of 1915. A few weeks
before he died, looking over the April Flemish plain, he wrote
one of the greatest lyrical poems in the language and which, so
long as English is read, will remain the epitaph of himself and his
generation:

*The naked earth is warm with spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's gaze glorying
And quivers in the sunny breeze;
And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light^
And a striving evermore for these;
And he is dead who will not fight;
Aud who dies fighting has increase.