Excerpt from Sonnets From the PatagonianWith the Allied cause crumbling away it is high time we thought of aesthetics. As a triste jest I said that to you the other, day, and your reply was a plea to let you write a preface for a new edition of my forgotten Sonnets from the Patagonian. I am at last persuaded, and who but you should do the preface?With Mitteleuropa a fact it should be apparent to any honest, thinking man that we are losing the War. Perhaps, in a larger sense, we have already lost the War and the dusk of the anglo-saxon is come. Then we are at last joined with the He'llenes and. Latins in the descending scale, and it is the Teuton now approaching the perihelion, with the Slap, yet to conquer, in the far distance. But that is an eye-survey for eternity, and we have merely to do with the finite present. 80 we may still think of resistance, and not yet abandon hope of postponing defeat.It is now the hour for the supreme test of America, and she too must fail, as our Allies have failed, before the H uns unless somewhere she can find the beauty and the strength of the human soul with which to give battle. For the first time in history it is souls, not guns, that will win the War, and remember, my dear friend, that Beauty is more necos sary than food that the soul may live.We are all but engulfed in error. We say that we do not hate the German people, it is the Kaiser we are fighting. A pitiful self-delusion! It must be the German people we hate as an overshadowing race, if our fight is to have even the excuse of the inflamed passion of the survival of the fittest. We must acknowledge the Kaiser as the symbol of the best organized form of government, unless we are frankly anarchists, the most efficient, the most powerful, the most nearly approaching a practical socialism. Let us, therefore, start afresh. We hate the German people, for they have threatened our complacent supremacy as lords of the world. Now we are at least truthful.Thus far, the Allies have failed signally as a military force. The Europeans have forgotten how to fight, and we in America have never learned. We have put too much. Faith in materialism, and betrayed the Soul and Beauty. There is more to life than living, and more to an army than, arms. The moment is here that demands we scrap the military leaders, as such, and seek stronger. Why not then turn to the Poets to direct the War, for, lo! It was the Poets who in seven days won the Irish Revolution. None knows better than you how I begrudge giving the ever turbulent West Britons any praise, any glory, but there is the simple truth. They vanquished the foe because they first had conquered fear, and then nought could stand against them.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.