Essays in War-Time

This book is point of view of literature the Great War of to day has brought us into a new and closer sympathy with the England of the past. Dr. Woods and Mr. Baltzly in their recent careful study of European Warfare, Is War Diminishing? come to the conclusion that England during the period of her great activity in the world has been fighting about half the time. We had begun to look on war as belonging to the past and insensibly fallen into the view of Buckle that in England a love of war is, as a national taste, utterly extinct. Now we have awakened to realise that we belong to a people who have been fighting about half the time. Thus it is, for instance, that we witness a revival of interest in Wordsworth, not that Wordsworth, the high priest of Nature among the solitary Lakes, whom we have never forsaken, but the Wordsworth who sang exultantly of Carnage as God's Daughter.