class="poetry">      

Therefore be satisfied;
Long life is in your treasury ere you fall;
Yes, and first love, like Dante’s.  O a bride
      For ever mystical!

      Irrevocable good,—
You dead, and now about, so young, to die,—
Your childhood was; there Space, there Multitude,
      There dwelt Antiquity.

NURSE EDITH CAVELL

Two o’clock, the morning of October 12th, 1915.

      To her accustomed eyes
The midnight-morning brought not such a dread
As thrills the chance-awakened head that lies
In trivial sleep on the habitual bed.

      ’Twas yet some hours ere light;
And many, many, many a break of day
Had she outwatched the dying; but this night
Shortened her vigil was, briefer the way.

      By dial of the clock
’Twas day in the dark above her lonely head.
“This day thou shalt be with Me.”  Ere the cock
Announced that day she met the Immortal Dead.

SUMMER IN ENGLAND, 1914

On London fell a clearer light;
   Caressing pencils of the sun
Defined the distances, the white
   Houses transfigured one by one,
The “long, unlovely street” impearled.
O what a sky has walked the world!

Most happy year!  And out of town
   The hay was prosperous, and the wheat;
The silken harvest climbed the down;
   Moon after moon was heavenly-sweet
Stroking the bread within the sheaves,
Looking twixt apples and their leaves.

And while this rose made round her cup,
   The armies died convulsed.  And when
This chaste young silver sun went up
   Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain.

Flower following tender flower; and birds,
   And berries; and benignant skies
Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.—
   Yonder are men shot through the eyes.
            Love, hide thy face
From man’s unpardonable race.

* * * * *

Who said “No man hath greater love than this,
   To die to serve his friend?”
So these have loved us all unto the end.
   Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed!
The soldier dying dies upon a kiss,
   The very kiss of Christ.

TO TINTORETTO IN VENICE

The Art of Painting had in the Primitive years looked with the light, not towards it.  Before Tintoretto’s date, however, many painters practised shadows and lights, and turned more or less sunwards; but he set the figure between himself and a full sun.  His work is to be known in Venice by the splendid trick of an occluded sun and a shadow thrown straight at the spectator.

Tintoretto’s thronged “Procession to Calvary” and his “Crucifixion,” incidentally named, are two of the greatest of his multitude of works in Venice.

      Master, thy enterprise,
Magnificent, magnanimous, was well done,
Which seized, the head of Art, and turned her eyes—
The simpleton—and made her front the sun.

      Long had she sat content,
Her young unlessoned back to a