[Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]

Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in
battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be
compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have
been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the
conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily
have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died,
having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how
easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
gorgeous woof.

The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
souls. So the sedge-warbler's