Beauty is there.'
Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
contemporaries.
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