Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare’s melancholy. His sorrow is idealist’s sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.
We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.
Now each man’s mind all Europe is,
he cries, in the first line in Happy England, and, as he remembers the peace of England, “her woods and wilds, her loveliness,” he exclaims:
O what a deep contented night
The sun from out her Eastern seas