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 comes...."
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.