Joyce Kilmer was a very rare combination of romance and common sense, and it is in that spirit, I am sure, that he would wish us to write about him. Therefore, I spare his brave and humorous shade-laughing, for all I know, over my shoulder as I write all comparisons with Byron at Missolonghi, or Sidney at Zütphen; and I even reluctantly forego, appropriate as it is, the lovely valediction: "Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burnèd is Apollo's laurel bough."

I would, if possible, shield Joyce Kilmer from the sentimentality which has brought a derivative and immature immortality to the grave of Rupert Brooke. At the same time, Kilmer was both a poet and a soldier, and he would be far from indifferent, as his lines on "The Proud Poet" assure us, to that peculiarly honorable laurel which we place upon the grave of the man who

wore his song like sword on thigh

And kept not all his valour for his lute."

"When you say", go his lines: of the making of ballads and songs that it is woman's work, You forget all the fighting poets that have been in every land."

To these he has been added, and I think it not unfair to the memory of some of the soldier-poets who preceded him-robbed, through no fault of their own, of the opportunity of deeds to recall that he died in actual warfare, in the eager, too eager carrying out of a particularly dangerous piece of work. The attitude in which his comrades found him, we read, was so like his keen living self that they did not at first think he was dead; for he lay, as if still scouting, with his eyes bent over a little ridge, seeking out the hidden battery which he and his comrades had gone out to unmask. How like him this will seem to all who knew and loved him; and I think, indeed, that these, knowing his spirit, can have scarcely hoped, when they saw him off to the war, that they would ever see him alive again. To come safe through such hazards as such a spirit must invite could only be possi

ble to that "charmed life" which, of old, has carried so many such flamelike fearless spirits scatheless through charge after charge, but to which, it is to be feared, the stock-yard methods of modern warfare are not favorable. When Joyce Kilmer chose to be a soldier, he knew what that choice meant, and those nearest and dearest to him knew also, knowing him. For their sake, had he or they willed, he could easily have remained in America and served his country with the patriotism of the pen. A home to the poignant reality and beauty of which every page of his poems bears witness, was in his keeping; but that home was one union of heroic hearts, and Joyce Kilmer went.

Of my many-alas! too few-meetings with Joyce Kilmer, one has always stood out in my memory as providing me with a sort of key-note to his nature, and even a hint of his destiny. I suppose that it was some ten years ago, and I was in the subway hanging on to a strap at the populous end of the afternoon. Out of the coma of that resignation which is a part of New York existence, I was aroused by a voice and a presence that suggested a very keen, a glittering young sword. A slim, rather tall, young man, more a boy yet than a man, had spoken my name, and was holding me with eyes which corresponded to the voice with a certain stern idealism on which, however, I was able to discern, so to say, the dew of youth. What we talked of I forget, except that it had to do with the craft to which we both belonged, but what I have never forgotten was the sense of finely tempered steel he left behind him, as I proceeded on my patient way, surrounded by the general mush of humanity. concentrated, intense young presence -masculine intense, not feminine

A very

was the impression of him that remained with me, after he was gone. Though the resemblance was perhaps only a spiritual expression, his then thin, austere young face, with those strangely strong and gentle eyes (eyes that seemed to have an independent, dominating existence) reminded me of Lionel Johnson, for whom he had already a great admiration, and whose religion he was afterwards to embrace. At that time, he did not suggest the physical robustness, almost burliness, with which most of his more recent acquaintances will associate him. Indeed, there was a suggestion that his body might well be overdelicate for the gleaming will inside, that the sword might outwear its sheath. In short, he left me with something of a sense of having met a spirit-on the subway. The phrase is liable, I know, to sentimental misinterpretation; but I must risk it, and hope to correct that later. The other feeling I had is open, too, to a like suspicion-that hint of destiny of which I have already spoken. We have all met young people who give us that-beautiful, brilliant, lovely-natured, so superabundant in all their qualities (and particularly perhaps in some quality of emanating light) as to make them suggest the supernatural, and touched, too, with the finger of a moonlight that has written "fated" upon their brows. Probably our feeling is nothing more mysterious than our realization that temperaments so vital and intense must inevitably tempt richer and swifter fates than those less wild and winged. I must not omit from my impression the feeling of an unaccustomed contact with vigorous purityagain masculine, not feminine, purity. And that memory of Joyce Kilmer was one that remained with me in all our later intercourse; and, whenever, af