passages of tenderness and odd pathos such as Barham seldom attempted. The ideas, sentiments, aspirations that run through the miscellaneous poems he wrote in the years before the war are in complete harmony with the spirit in which he promptly took up arms when the war came. 'The Cross in the Rock,' with its insistence that 'Love and Right shall rule for aye,' might almost have been written in anticipation of the ordeal through which the world has passed, and is passing:
Though Justice for a while delay
When the oppressed to her hath cried,
No righteous tear is shed in vain,
And Time no wrong hath justified.
For every jot unjustly ta'en
A tyrant nation yet shall pay,
And deep the cup of penance drain.
He unfolds his faith in 'Life's Prologue,' that whatever poor part may be given to us, and however cramped and sorry the setting, we should scorn to have any doubt or fear but 'hold the stage like men'; and reiterates it in 'The Song of the Stars':
