" But why should Mr. Kipling's
rugged lines have cropped up in my memory rather than the smoother
verses of other poets, equally familiar to me, and equally well fitted
to point the contrast?--for instance, Mr. Housman's:--
"It dawns in Asia, tombstones show,
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn's dead."
Or Mr. Newbolt's:
"_Qui procul hinc_--the legend's writ,
The frontier grave is far away;
_Qui ante diem periit,
Sed miles, sed fro patria_."
The reason simply was that during the month I had spent in America the
air had been filled with Kipling. His name was the first I had heard
uttered on landing--by the conductor of a horse-car. Men of light and
leading, and honourable women not a few, had vied with each other in
quoting his refrains; and I had seen the crowded audience at a low
music-hall stirred to enthusiasm by the delivery of a screed of maudlin
verses on his illness. He, the rhapsodist of the red coat, was out and
away the most popular poet in the country of the blue, and that at a
time when the blue coat in itself was inimitably popular. Nor could
there be any doubt that his _Barrack-room Ballads_ were the most popular
of his works.
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