Autumn in England, why art thou sublime,
So meekly mantled in thy Quaker grey?
No shining coquetry of tropic clime
Could e'er estrange me, nor could e'er allay
My longing for the country of my birth,
Where winds are passion-voiced, and lullabies
Of raging tempest rock the sons of Earth.
Autumn in England, mine till memory dies!
Sincerity and a simple naturalness of thought and sentiment are the keynotes of Sergeant Colin Mitchell's little collection of verses, Trampled Clay. The brotherly regard that grew up betwixt officers and men whose days were bounded by the common peril of the trenches is in the breezy, rugged story of 'Our Captain'; there is naked realism and power in the thumb-nail battle-sketch 'Hooge'; charm in the brief idyll of 'Hughine and Ninette'; the boyish fun of the regiment in 'Soliloquies on the March'; and in others are a man's unpretentious musings on life and death and the ways of God, and a sorrow for the dead and for those who will miss them.
The wonder is that so much verse,
