might have spoken of a bird without wings or a sea without water. And in this they were right philosophically, far more right than the world would now admit because all things grow more paradoxical as we approach the central truth. But for all human imaginative or artistic purposes nothing worse could be said of a work of beauty than that it is infinite; for to be infinite is to be shapeless, and to be shapeless is to be something more than mis-shapen. No man really wishes a thing which he believes divine to be in this earthly sense infinite. No one would really like a song to last for ever, or a religious service to last for ever, or even a glass of good ale to last for ever. And this is surely the reason that men have pursued towards the idea of holiness, the course that they have pursued; that they have marked it out in particular spaces, limited it to particular days, worshipped an ivory statue, worshipped a lump of stone. They have desired to give to it the chivalry and dignity of definition, they have desired to save it from the degradation of infinity. This is the real weakness of all imperial or conquering ideals in nationality. No one can love his country with the particular affection which is appropriate to the relation, if he thinks it is a thing in its nature indeterminate, something which is growing in the night, something which lacks the tense excitement of a boundary. No Roman citizen could feel the same when once it became possible for a rich Parthian or a rich Carthaginian to become a Roman citizen by waving his hand. No man wishes the thing he loves to grow, for he does not wish it to alter. No

Imperialist would be pleased if he came home in the evening from business and found his wife eight feet high.

The dangers upon the side of this transcendental insularity are no doubt considerable. There lies in it primarily the great danger of the thing called idolatry, the worship of the object apart from or against the idea it represents. But he must surely have had a singular experience who thinks that this insular or idolatrous fault is the particular fault of one age. We are not likely to suffer from any painful resemblance to the men of Thermopylae, the Zealots, who raged round the fall of Jerusalem, to the thunderbolts of Eastern faith and valour who hurled themselves on the guns of Lord Kitchener. If we are rushing upon any destruction it is not, at least, upon this.

G. K. CHESTERTON.

THE MARKET GIRL.

(Country Song.)

I.

Nobody took any notice of her as she stood on the causeykerb,

A-trying to sell her honey and apples, and bunches of garden herb;

And if she had offered to give her wares, and herself with them too, that day,

I doubt if a soul would have cared to take a bargain so choice

away.

II.

But chancing to trace her sunburnt grace that morning as I passed nigh,

I went and I said, “Poor maidy, dear! And will none o' the people buy?"

And so it began; and soon we knew what the end of it all

must be,

And I found that though no others had bid, a prize had been

won by me.

THOMAS HARDY.