was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his
madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending
indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have
only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the
certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.

[MARCH, 1918.




_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_


We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins
with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which
disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward
Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a
palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more
resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like
a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There
will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead
will seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet 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.