and set an example of brave self-sacrifice to the young men of America, which culminated in his heroic death in action, on July 4, 1916, at the age of twenty-eight, at Belloy-en-Santerre.
The last of the three, Robert W. Service, a man of forty-one , an Englishman by birth, a Canadian by adoption, is still living, and is driving a Red Cross ambulance "somewhere in France," having enlisted with the Medical Division of the French Army, almost at once, after the "world-war" began.
RUPERT BROOKE, it is said, was one of the handsomest Englishmen of his time. As his friends lovingly described him, he was a "golden young Apollo," the embodied spirit of youth and joy. "Hair of deep browny gold, smooth ruddy face, and eyes of living blue, he typified the 'Youth of the World,' and his moods were the radiance of an early summer's day. With him came a happy shining impression that he might have just come—that very moment—from another planet, one well within the solar system, but a little more like Utopia than ours."
I have said so much at length of him, because, it seems to me, that all these qualities of his personality are reflected in the poems he has left, especially in his earlier ones. Perhaps none better illustrates this than the one he has named "The Hill," breathing, as it does, the ecstasy of fife and youth:
