There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.
If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to
the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for
what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did,
his style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty
faint and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the
prose and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all
that is for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of
woman, in the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in
whatever is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own
perfection, most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must
endure the impermanent a little, for these things return, but not
wholly, for no two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned
eyes, no two flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of
the individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and
that the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his
home in the Serpent's mouth?