But beauty vanishes; beauty passes;
However rare-rare it be;

And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

TIRED TIM

Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.
He lags the long bright morning through,
Ever so tired of nothing to do;

He moons and mopes the livelong day,
Nothing to think about, nothing to say;
Up to bed with his candle to creep,
Too tired to yawn; too tired to sleep:
Poor tired Tim! It's sad for him.

OLD SUSAN

When Susan's work was done, she'd sit
With one fat guttering candle lit,
And window opened wide to win
The sweet night air to enter in;
There, with a thumb to keep her place
She'd read, with stern and wrinkled face.
Her mild eyes gliding very slow
Across the letters to and fro,

While wagged the guttering candle flame
In the wind that through the window came.

And sometimes in the silence she
Would mumble a sentence audibly,
Or shake her head as if to say,
'You silly souls, to act this way!'
And never a sound from night I'd hear,
Unless some far-off cock crowed clear;
Or her old shuffling thumb should turn
Another page; and rapt and stern,
Through her great glasses bent on me
She'd glance into reality;

And shake her round old silvery head,
With You!-I thought you was in bed!'-
Only to tilt her book again,

And rooted in Romance remain.

NOD

Softly along the road of evening,
In a twilight dim with rose,

Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew
Old Nod, the shepherd, goes.

His drowsy flock streams on before him,
Their fleeces charged with gold,

To where the sun's last beam leans low
On Nod the shepherd's fold.

The hedge is quick and green with briar,
From their sand the conies creep;

And all the birds that fly in heaven

Flock singing home to sleep.

His lambs outnumber a noon's roses,
Yet, when night's shadows fall,
His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon,
Misses not one of all.

His are the quiet steeps of dreamland,
The waters of no-more-pain;

His ram's bell rings 'neath an arch of stars,
Rest, rest, and rest again."

G. K. Chesterton

This brilliant journalist, novelist, essayist, publicist and lyricist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, was born at Campden Hill, Kensington, in 1874, and began his literary life by reviewing books on art for various magazines. He is best known as a writer of flashing, paradoxical essays on anything and everything, like Tremendous Trifles (1909), Varied Types (1905), and All Things Considered (1910). But he is also a stimulating critic; a keen appraiser, as in his volume Heretics (1905) and his analytical studies of Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, and George Bernard Shaw; a writer of strange and grotesque romances like The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1906), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), which Chesterton himself has subtitled "A Nightmare," and The Flying Inn (1914); the author of several books of fantastic short stories, ranging from the wildly whimsical narratives in The Club of Queer Trades (1905) to that amazing sequence The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)—which is a series of religious detective stories!

Besides being the creator of all of these, Chesterton finds time to be a prolific if sometimes too acrobatic newspaperman, a lay preacher in disguise (witness Orthodoxy [1908], What's Wrong with the World? [1910], The Ball and the Cross

[1909]) a pamphleteer, and a poet. His first volume of verse, The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900), a collection of quaintly-flavored and affirmative verses, was followed by The Ballad of the White Horse (1911), one long poem which, in spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is possibly the most stirring creation he has achieved. This poem has the swing, the vigor, the spontaneity, and, above all, the ageless simplicity of the true narrative ballad.

Scarcely less notable is the ringing "Lepanto" from his later Poems (1915) which, anticipating the banging, clanging verses of Vachel Lindsay's "The Congo," is one of the finest of modern chants. It is interesting to see how the syllables beat, as though on brass; it is thrilling to feel how, in one's pulses, the armies sing, the feet tramp, the drums snarl, and all the tides of marching crusaders roll out of lines like:

་་

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war;

Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold;
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,

Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he

Chesterton, the prose-paradoxer, is a delightful product of a skeptical age. But it is Chesterton the poet who is more likely to outlive it.

LEPANTO1

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,

And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,

It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;

'From Poems by G. K. Chesterton. Copyright by the John Lane Co. and reprinted by permission of the publishers.

It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips; For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships. They have dared the white republics up the capes of

Italy,

They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and

loss,

And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.

The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;

From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the

sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,

Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,

Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has

sung,

That once went singing southward when all the world was young.

In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,

Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,

Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,