“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:
It is indeed a new world. How far away seem those grassy, moonlit places in England that have been Roman camps or roads, where there is always serenity, and the spirit of a purpose at rest, and the sunlight flashes upon more than flint! Here one is perpetually a first-comer.... The flowers are less conscious than English flowers, the breezes have nothing to remember, and everything to promise. There walk, as yet, no ghosts of lovers in Canadian lanes.... There is nothing lurking in the heart of the shadows, and no human mystery in the colors, and neither the same joy nor the kind of peace in dawn and sunset that older lands know....
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?--