bailey] the great LOVER 45 



enthusiasm of these many meetings the fervent greeting of one 

 to the other, are the burnings of love. Forgetting for the time 

 the sorrows and the contests of hfe, we come here for one week 

 in recuperation. Now will you hear me talk of my plant. Now 

 shall I listen to your story of your discovery. Now do chemistry 

 and botany and physics and zoology and mathematics all weld 

 themselves into fellowships. In the old celestial philosophies 

 whereby man was a pilgrim and a wanderer in a vale of tears, 

 feeling blindly for the route home, these things could not be. 

 Here is our home. Here are we all together. Here is the abound- 

 ing earth. Here are the Things, here the Phenomena. 



These fellowships, these loves of the lovers, must be all to the 

 good of the race when considered in the large. Selfishness is yet 

 an attribute of the human mind, perhaps a remembrance of the 

 old savage struggle for food and for mates. But as we discuss 

 things in common, so do we forget the old limitations. If inter- 

 national friendships are ever to be restored after the Great Collapse 

 it will not be by the meeting of kings, of cabinets, of diplomats, of 

 politicians, of theologians, of lawyers. It will be by the meeting 

 in convention of students, particularly of students of science, — the 

 term science very broadly considered. 



But I must not take 3'Our time with imagery or entertain you 

 with vagaries. I took the title of this address from a poet, a 

 poet who loved life as all true poets must, and who knew that life 

 is made up of the niany small concrete experiences. This poet 

 is Rupert Brooke, said by some to have intellectual kinship with 

 Shelley and Keats, a poet lost in his youth in the Great War. 

 Hear Rupert Brooke : 



*I have been so great a lover: filled my days 

 So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise, 

 The pain, the calm, and the astonishment, 

 Desire illimitable, and still content. 

 And all dear names men use, to cheat despair, 

 For the perplexed and viewless streams that bear 

 Our hearts at random down the dark of life. 



So, for their sakes I loved, ere I go hence 



And the high cause of Love's magnificence. 



And to keep loyalties young, I'll write those names 



*Reprinted by permission of John Lane Co. from "The Collected Poems 

 of Rupert Brooke." 



