I Am A Soldier, Convinced

The Dead...are More Real Than The Living Because They Are Complete.

Oh Yes, I Know The Way To Heaven Was Easy. We Found The Little Kingdom Of Our Passion That All Can Share Who Walk The Road Of Lovers. In Wild And Secret Happiness We Stumbled; And Gods And Demons Clamoured In Our Senses.

Mud And Rain And Wretchedness And Blood. Why Should Jolly Soldier-boys Complain? God Made These Before The Roofless Flood - Mud And Rain.

For It Is Humanly Certain That Most Of Us Remember Very Little Of What We Have Read. To Open Almost Any Book A Second Time Is To Be Reminded That We Had Forgotten Well-nigh Everything That The Writer Told Us. Parting From The Narrator And His Narrative, We Retain Only A Fading Impression; And He, As It Were, Takes The Book Away From Us And Tucks It Under His Arm.

But I've Grown Thoughtful Now. And You Have Lost Your Early-morning Freshness Of Surprise At Being So Utterly Mine: You've Learned To Fear The Gloomy, Stricken Places In My Soul, And The Occasional Ghosts That Haunt My Gaze.