Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/162

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This is far from being the outlook upon war of the ordinary boy of nineteen; but you cannot read Henry Simpson's poems without knowing he was no ordinary boy. His home was at Crosby-on-Eden, Carlisle, where he was born in June 1897. He became a scholar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1915. Mr. H. C. Duffin, who was his English master during his last four years at Carlisle School, bears testimony to his fine, swift, vivacious spirit and the firm-set 'sanity and strength' of his character. 'It was sheer joy,' he writes, 'to watch his lambent mind playing round his fellows in the not undistinguished Sixth of which he was undisputed head at school; and yet withal an incomparable modesty. The fountain of his laughing voice will fall for ever on our ears. His face—clean cut as a cameo under the black hair—was the index of his mind; such beauty could not but be the complement of a life and soul of rare perfection. And indeed he was the fairest of his own thoughts; his life was the loveliest of his lyrics. And yet you are to con-