I saw her bowed by Time's relentless hand,
Calm as cut marble, cold and beautiful,
As if old sighs through the dim night of years,
Like frosted snowflakes on the silent land,
Had fallen: and old laughter and old tears,
Old tenderness, old passion, spent and dead,
Had moulded her their stony monument:
While ghostly memory lent
Treasure of form and harmony to drape her head....
Oh, could I pluck (methought) from out yon breast
A share of her rich mystery, and feel,
Flushing my soul with new adventurous zeal
The fiery perfume of that flame-born flower,
Which grows in man to God: then I might wrest
Glad secrets from the past—the golden dower
Of the world's sunrise and young glimmering East.
And the same feeling stirring the same longings is in the sonnet to Oxford:
...Trees draw their sacrifice of greenery
From the old charnels that repose beneath;
So let me feel the impulse of thy breath,
Like an enchanter's spell, awakening me
To thy new treasures of Eternity
Bursting from out the pregnant soils of Death....
But two years saw the end of these dreams, when the war brought his Oxford career to a close. He won the Newdigate Prize of 1914 with his poem, 'The Burial of Sophocles'; and in the August of that
