IT sometimes happens that a hero is remembered more for the true man he was than for any fair deeds he may have wrought. Such a man was that “very perfect gentle knight,” Sir Philip Sidney. A scholar and a poet, a courtier and a soldier, he walked with grave men without becoming dull and with kings without becoming vain. In the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when brave men like Grenville, Drake, and Raleigh were finding a new world overseas for England, and rare souls like those of the Mermaid Tavern—Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and “best Shakespeare,” himself—were building up a mighty kingdom of the mind and heart, Sir Philip Sidney was a bright figure in the realms of high adventure and of song.

It was not because of epic deeds or lyric verse, however, that all England mourned the death of the young soldier. It is not for his sword or for his song that he lives in the deathless company of England’s heroes, but for his knightly heart. The oft-repeated tale of how, mortally wounded, he forgot his own parching thirst and held out the water they brought him to a dying comrade, with the words, “Thy need is greater than mine,” lives in memory because in it the true Sidney still lives.

This is the story of one who has been called the Sidney of our own day—a young poet to whom the gods, it seemed, had given all their best gifts, graces of body and of mind. When it was known that he had gone to “do his bit” in the great war, people said fearfully, “Death loves a shining mark!” When news came that he was dead, it seemed as if the shadow of loss could never be lightened. Yet it is not for the song of the poet or the sacrifice of the soldier that he will be remembered, but for something rare and beautiful in the man himself that won the hearts of all who knew him.

They said of Rupert Brooke, “He is the ideal youth of England—of merry England!” It seemed as if something of all that was fair and brave and free in English days and English ways had passed into the bright blueness of his eyes, the warm glow under the tan of his cheeks, and the live, shining hair that waved back from his broad clear brow.

From the very beginning his country took him to herself. He first saw the light of a summer day at Rugby, under the shadow of the ivy-covered turrets where that great friend of boys, Thomas Arnold, was headmaster in the days of Tom Brown. Rupert’s father was assistant master at the school, and so the boy grew up on “The Close,” where the happy haunts of many happy boys were the charmed playground of his earliest years, and the football field the ringing plain of his first dreams of glory and achievement.

“What a wonderful world it was to be born into, that little England that was mine,” said Rupert, “and how it seemed as if the days were not half long enough for one to taste all the joys they brought. How I loved everything—sights and sounds, the feel and breath of living, stirring things! I loved not only rainbows and dewdrops sparkling in cool flowers, but also footprints in the dew and washed stones gay for an hour. Wet roofs beneath the lamplight had their gleam of enchantment, and the blue bitter smoke of an autumn fire was like magic incense.”

Most people have eyes to see only that which is exceptional—the exclamation marks of nature’s round, like sunset, moonrise, mountains wrapped in purple mists, or still water under a starry sky. They do not see the beauty in the changes of the common daylight, in familiar trees, a winding path, and a few dooryard posies.

But Rupert noted with lingering tenderness the shapes and colors of all the simple daily things.

he said, when dreaming fondly and whimsically of his boyish days. And how he loved little shy, half-hidden things—elfin moss flowers, downy curled-up ferns under the dry leaves, the musty smell of the dead leaves themselves and of the moist, moldy earth. But he was never one of those who must seek beauty in the haunts of nature untouched by man. The splendid copper beech, kingly and kind, in the headmaster’s garden, and Dr. Arnold’s own fern-leaved tree, whose tender gleams and flickerings gladdened every one who lingered in its shade, were dearer than any aloof forest monarchs could have been.

It seemed as if all the things that Rupert saw and loved somehow became part of himself. Something of the swift life of darting birds, of quivering winged insects, and furtive scurrying creatures in fur was in the alert swiftness of his lithe young body. One found oneself thinking of fair fields under a bright sky, of hedgerows abloom, of all the singing, golden warmth that makes an English summer sweet, in looking into the glowing beauty of the boy’s eager face.

“Rupert can’t be spoiled or he would have been long ago,” said one of the Rugby boys. “He never stops to bother about what people say of him. Of course a chap who can play football and carry off school honors at the same time has something better to think about.”

It was true that young Brooke found his world full of many absorbing things. He was already entering upon the poet’s kingdom. Words, he found, could work mighty spells. All the rich pageantry of the days of knights and crusaders passed before him as a few verses sounded in his ears. Another line—and he saw

How splendid it would be to make fine, thrilling things live in words! He knew, though, that he could never live in the past or in the dream pictures that fancy painted. His life was in the real things of the present, and his song must be of the life he knew and felt. Would he ever be able to find singing words for all the singing life about him and within?

Sometimes he all but gave up the trial. How foolish to bother about writing poems when one might live them! A rush—a fine scrimmage—a chance for the goal—life in doing—that was better than any printed page. As he played on the eleven for Rugby it seemed as if mind and body were one. Life was strength and swiftness, and victory after effort.

But the young athlete, who knew the joy of playing and winning for his school, swept on by the cheers of his comrades, knew too the joy in the play of the mind, urged on by the secret longing of his heart. This inner athlete “rejoiced as a strong man to run a race” when he wrote his prize poem, “The Bastille.” He laughed to himself to think of how he had gone to the traditions of an old French prison for inspiration for the finest, freest verse he had yet made. It was plain now that he must be a poet. The things he loved should find an immortal life in his song. His successes at cricket and football could not compare with this triumph. There was no power like the mastery of the mind.

Going from Rugby to Cambridge, he soon won an enviable reputation as a man of parts and a poet of much promise. His keen appreciative mind, his ready wit and personal charm, made him a favorite with the best men of the university.

“I do not see why he need be a poet,” said Henry James, the American novelist and critic, who lived for many years in England. “Any one who can give such all around satisfaction as a human being should not be encouraged to specialize. Surely one who can be so much that makes life more worth while for every one who knows him, ought not to have to struggle to do things.”

Rupert had other friends of this mind, but as the months went by and the youth grew to the full stature of his manhood, the longing to win fuller power as a poet grew with him. More than ever it seemed the one gift he would have. Not as others had sung, but a new song for a new age would he sing. He could never be merely “an idle singer of an empty day.”

In the meantime he carried off the prize of a fellowship at King’s College, which gave him means to go on with his study and writing. Just as scholarship helps a student with his college expenses, so a fellowship gives a graduate an income to enable him to carry forward some special work for which he has proved particular fitness, and which bids fair to be of value to the world.

The fellowship allowed Rupert Brooke to study where he would. He spent a year in Germany—in Munich and Berlin—but he learned there, above everything else, a new appreciation of his own England. In his charming, whimsical poem “Grantchester,” written in Berlin in May, 1912, he pictures his home by the river Cam in lilac time, and nothing in the perfectly regulated, efficient German world that surrounds him can compare with that place his heart knows.

Once again at home in the cozy vicarage at Grantchester, when he tired of his book-littered study he could walk through the shadowy green tunnel that the great chestnut trees made beside the river and dream of the poems that he would some day have power to call into being. More than anything else he loved to swim in the laving waters of “Byron’s Pool,” at night or in the magic half-light of dawn. Then it seemed as if the past and the present were one, and as if the shades of those other poets who had found refreshment and inspiration near that same fair stream came again to linger lovingly by its waters.

He felt himself in a very real sense “heir of all the ages” as his body cut and darted through the water; the life of the past no less than the life of the present surrounded him, buoyed him

up. His clean strokes gave him a sense of happy mastery.

Diving, however, was another matter. Again and again he made the trial, but always landed flat. The unfeeling surface of Lord Byron’s pool would all but slap the breath out of his defenseless body, but he ever came up gallantly to a new plunge until his muscles had learned their trick. What joy when he won his first happy high dive—“into cleanness leaping” with keen lithe grace. That morning, sky and water were one tender, rose-tinged, rippling coolness of silver gray, and the breakfast spread in the dewy garden was a feast for gods and heroes. The eggs were golden fare indeed, and the honey tasted of hawthorn and apple blossoms.

With a like persistency, he practised diving of another sort. Again and again he essayed the plunge far below the surface of every-day thoughts and fancies in the hope of bringing up the perfect pearl of his dreams—a poem in which the white light of truth should be all fair-rounded, pure-gleaming beauty. “I can feel the one thing that is worth while, and it seems as if I had it in my hand,” he mourned, “but when I look there is only a wisp of seaweed, and a shell or two with echoes in their pearly coils of the eternal whisper of the waves!”

“Your life is too much an unbroken round of happy happenings,” hinted one of his friends. “If you could run away into the wilds for a time—away from your many admiring friends and the chatter of afternoon teas and tennis courts—you might find yourself more in touch with the big things you long for.”

“I think I’ll try a trip to America,” resolved the young poet. “There may be some sort of a new world still to be discovered in the States or Canada—or beyond among the islands of the South Seas.”

In his “Letters from America,” which appeared first in the “Westminster Gazette” and were afterward published with a biographical introduction by Henry James, we have some of his off-hand impressions of the New World. We get glimpses of New York Harbor at night and in the early morning, as a poet sees it. We see the crowds and electric glare of Broadway with something of the detached amusement that a careless and idly curious traveler from another planet might feel. And we see a Harvard-Yale baseball game and the 1913 Commencement at Cambridge with the eyes of that elder Cambridge across the Atlantic. This is the way the one-time cricketer and football champion viewed his first “ball game.”

“The glimpses you give of the ‘States’ are brief and, for the most part, superficial,” we accused him, not unjustly. “You approach what you are pleased to call our ‘rag-time civilization’ in a rag-time mood.”

“You delightful Americans are too sensitive,” he replied with his irresistible smile. “Of course no mere Briton could do you justice in a few random, hastily-flung newspaper letters. One of these days I hope to work up these trivial jottings in some more thoughtful and not unworthy fashion.”

He describes Niagara Falls, the Canadian Rockies, and the South Seas with a poet’s appreciation, but with an irrepressible homesickness for his little England. He wonders and admires, but misses the haunting echoes of humanity, the sense of a loving, lingering past, that make the English landscape dear:

In the perfect lazy content of the South Pacific isles, that are, he says, “compound of all legendary heavens,” Rupert Brooke led a blissful, lotus-eating existence. Nowhere had he even imagined such serene bodily well-being as he found darting, floating, and dreaming through the irised waves, lulled by the faint thunder of the surf on the distant reef. It seemed, too, that this must be the seventh heaven of song. If swimming and poetry had been all, home and friends might have called in vain. But the young poet’s love of England was proof against every beguiling lure. Do you remember how Tennyson in his “Palace of Art,” after showing pictures of every sort of loveliness—beautiful, enchanting, magical glimpses of many lands—turns at last to this scene as best of all?—

Even so Rupert Brooke, from his South Sea paradise, longed for the “ancient peace” of the old vicarage by the River Cam. Never for a moment did he forget that he was England’s—flesh of her flesh, soul of her soul.

Soon after his return from his wander year, before his joy in all the dear home ways had lost any of its new zest, it seemed as if the old comfortable order of things might pass away forever. The face of his world was changed in a day. From a brand fired somehow, somewhere, in the mysterious Balkans, all Europe was suddenly ablaze. England awoke from her preoccupation with her own family difficulties—the Irish Home-rule question, the disputes between capital and labor, and the militant suffragettes. She could not see Belgium and France destroyed. Englishmen who had been reading with incredulous amazement the daily reports of the threatening violence of the continental misunderstanding, and congratulating themselves on their sane and secure aloofness, awoke to find that they were at war with Germany and Austria.

Rupert Brooke was camping out that fateful August of 1914 in a place remote from newspapers with their rumors of war. Away on a sailing trip, he heard no news of any sort for the space of four days. Then on his return, as he stepped out on the beach with singing pulses and the happy tang of the salt spray on his lips, a telegram was put in his hands: “We’re at war with Germany. England has joined France and Russia,” it read.

It was as if all the winds of heaven had passed in a moment into a dreadful, breathless calm. In the stunned and sultry stillness that engulfed him, his whole being hung helpless like an empty sail. He ate and drank as one in a dream, and then went out alone to the top of a hill of gorse, where he sat looking broodingly at the sea and trying to understand. Over and over he repeated the words, “England at war—war with Germany! Germany!...” Scraps of memories—pleasant, appealing, and humorous—floated by like bits of remembered tunes: the convivial glitter of a Berlin cafÉ; the restful charm of a quiet-colored summer evening at Munich; the merry masquerade and revelry of carnival time; the broad peasant women singing at their work in the fields. Could it be that all the wholesome, friendly world he knew there had changed—had become a menace, a thing to be hated?

Not only the Germany he knew, but the whole world, was trembling. The earth was not the stable place of solid content and cheerful achievement he had always taken for granted. A shrinking, quaking nightmare of change had seized the foundations of the universe in its trembling grip. The months ahead loomed gaunt and strange—no days for happy work; no quiet evenings for untroubled friendship and affection; no time to “loaf and invite one’s soul”; no place for play, for music, for poetry, for anything that made life worth living. An age “of blood and iron” had swallowed up the golden age. England would be merry England no longer.

England! The name rang in his ears like a knell. England invaded! “I realized with a sudden tightening of the heart,” he said, “that the earth of England was like a loved face, like a friend’s honor—something holy. The full flood of what England meant to my inmost self swept me on from thought to thought. Gray, uneven little fields, and small ancient hedges rushed before me, wild flowers, elms and beeches, gentleness, sedate houses of red brick, proudly unassuming, a countryside of rambling hills and friendly copses—the England that had given me life and light!”

England! The name was now a trumpet call! What were the piping times of peace to this great moment when he could go out as England’s son to meet her foes, to keep her sacred soil safe from the invaders’ tread? Aloud he said grimly, “Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there.”

It seemed to many as if this terrible war must indeed be the mysterious Armageddon, darkly foreshadowed in the Book of Revelation as the war of wars, when the “kings of the earth and the whole world” should gather for the battle that would usher in the great day of God. It was to be the war to end war.

Rupert Brooke, a sub-lieutenant of the Royal Naval Division, was one of that brave, futile company of Englishmen that were hastily flung across the Channel to the defense of Antwerp. Crouching in ditches, rifles in hand, they waited the approach of an unseen enemy whose big guns were shelling the outer forts from a point beyond the horizon line. There was nothing that the bravest could do but lie there amid the whistling, screaming shells, and fall back as ordered when the range of the heavy fire advanced. The battle was fought by the great cannon and the scouting aËroplane that circled high overhead and signaled the range to the distant battery.

When the forts crumbled before the bombardment—pitiful hopes of the old order before the deadly engines of the new—the city was a place of terror and desolation. The hideous din of bursting shells, the crash of falling houses and shattering glass, mingled with the terrified cries of distracted fugitives. The young poet-soldier, marching in a night retreat under a black sky, lighted fitfully by the glare of burning villages, saw the pathetic multitude of helpless refugees hurrying eastward. There were two small children trying to help their mother push a wheelbarrow piled with clothing on which sat the feeble, trembling grandmother. Another family had loaded all their most cherished possessions in a little milk-cart, pulled by a panting dog, while a heavy-eyed lad of nine pushed from behind and watched to see that nothing was dropped by the way. Aged peasants with bundles on their backs tottered by, and mothers with tiny babies in their arms trudged wearily along, trying to comfort the frightened children who ran by their side or clung to their skirts. All had the dazed faces of the victims of flood or fire, who flee from the place that was home to the uncertain refuge of outer strangeness.

It seemed to Rupert Brooke that the suffering he saw was his own. As in the old Rugby time, when everything that the days brought—honest work, hearty play, and happy comradeship, in a fair English land under peaceful skies—was taken up as food for his eager life and made a part of himself, so now it seemed that body and soul alike tasted every grief and distress that can come to helpless humanity. There were new depths in the brave blue eyes that had seen defeated hopes and yet never doubted that right would triumph. The face that had before expressed promise, now showed power.

All through the trying weeks that followed in his training-camp in England, he carried with him the memory of those tragic days in Belgium. “I would not forget if I could,” he said steadily. “Remembering is sharing.” And steadily, with a strength that ever cries, “We’re baffled that we may fight better!” he looked past the darkness of the present to the victory that his spirit saw.

The hard monotony of the days became glorious. All his life was alight with the fervor of his love for his native land and his longing to serve her. There was room in his heart for but one thought—England! And in the singleness of his devotion he felt a wonderful peace that outer happenings could not give or take away. He was safe from the chances of the changing days—safe with “things undying.” Safe!—That word which sometimes makes men craven, sounded in his ears like a note of triumph; and the lines of a new song came to his lips:

A wonderful thing had happened. The young soldier who had lost many things those first weeks of the war—carefree days and nights, the joy and bright confidence of youth—had found his man’s soul. And the maker of verses had become a true poet. In losing his life he had found it, and found, too, the one gift he had long sought in vain.

Rupert Brooke had learned to “see life steadily and see it whole.” The five “1914 sonnets” have the wise simplicity, the deep feeling, and the large vision that belong to great poetry. When the poet-soldier embarked with the troops that were sent on the ill-starred Dardanelles campaign, he had the joy of knowing that whatever might befall, something of his inmost life would live forever in immortal verse to stir the hearts of living men.

He never reached Gallipoli. On April 23, 1915, the day of St. Michael and St. George, he died, not in battle, but of illness on a French hospital-ship. Early in April he had suffered a sunstroke, but had apparently recovered. Then it was known that he was the victim of blood-poisoning. “Death loves a shining mark!” and “Whom the Gods love!”—The unspoken words gripped the hearts of his comrades with chill fear, yet it seemed unbelievable that this radiant young life should be snuffed out.

The poet, himself, had a definite premonition of the end—During the days of fever, his mind found now and again a cool peace in the memories of the past. He was a Rugby boy again. Now he sat in the chapel, looking at the light as it fell, jeweled green, blue, and ruby-red, through the stained glass window of the Wise Men, that Dr. Arnold had brought from an old church at Aerschot, near Louvain. Louvain—Belgium! He could not lie there quietly; his country needed him. He moved suddenly as if about to rise, and a nurse bent over him anxiously. But—once more he was at Rugby, standing before the statue of the author of “Tom Brown” and spelling out its inscription as he had when a child: “Watch ye. Stand fast in the faith. Quit ye like men. Be strong.”—Again he was on the porch leading to the quadrangle where the boys were assembled for house singing. How the “Floreat, floreat, floreat, Rugbeia” rang out!

Was it not getting very dark? He could scarcely see the white figure of the nurse. Perhaps there was going to be a storm.... He remembered a hurricane at Rugby when he was only eight years old—the “big storm,” they always called it. Many of the fine elms were laid low, among others the one survivor of Tom Brown’s “three trees.”

“Think of all the years of sun and wind that have been made into the magnificent strength of that tree,” some one had mourned. “And now see it snapped like a straw before the fury of a single hour!”

“Perhaps it’s happier to go like a warrior in battle, than just to grow old and die little by little,” the boy had said. He had somehow dimly felt that the splendid spirit of the tree—the life that ever flickered golden-green in the sunlight and danced in joyous abandon in the May breeze—had fared forth on the wings of the wind, a part of the brave spirit of things that deathless goes on forever from change to change....

They buried him at night, carrying his body by torchlight to an olive grove on the isle of Scyros, a mile inland on the heights. “If you go there,” writes Mr. Stephen Graham, “you will find a little wooden cross with just his name and the date of his birth and his death (1887-1915) marked in black.” One who knew him said, “Let his just epitaph be: ‘He went to war in the cause of peace and died without hate that love might live.’”

Better than any inscription or memorial, however, are the words of his own poem, The Soldier, in which his love for his country still lives. It echoes to-day in the hearts of many who, at their country’s call, “go to war in the cause of peace.”