The Whole Man at his Full Imaginative Height

"A poetry which excludes the searchings of reason and the promptings of the moral sense is by so much the less impassioned, the less various and human, the less a product of the whole man at his full imaginative height" C. Day Lewis: The Poetic Image, p. 133.

Evening Hymn

O God, whose daylight leadeth downInto the sunless way,Who with restoring sleep dost crownThe labour of the day!What I have done, Lord, make it cleanWith thy forgiveness dear;That so to-day what might have been,To-morrow may appear.And when my thought is all astray,Yet think thou on in me;That with the new-born innocent dayMy soul rise fresh …

(To Answer All My Need)

They all were looking for a kingTo slay their foes, and lift them highThou cam'st a little baby thingThat made a woman cry.O son of man, to right my lotNaught but thy presence can avail;Yet on the road they wheels are not,Nor on the sea thy sail!My fancied ways why shouldst thou heed?Thou coms't down …

The MacBeths, with Chesterton

IN STUDYING any eternal tragedy the first question necessarily is what part of tragedy is eternal. If there be any element in man's work which is in any sense permanent it must have this characteristic, that it rebukes first one generation and then another, but rebukes them always in opposite directions and for opposite faults. …

This Keen and Piercing Charity

We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human …

Two Hundred Times

One of the facts he discovers by experience, of course, is the power and popularity of repetition. As a young man, he would disdain to say the same thing twice; as an older man, he knows it will not even begin to exist till he has said it about two hundred times. He discovers, among …

Your Soul

Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance… For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you - you, the individual reader… Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and …

One Whose Face You Knew

“Do you remember what the song you were singing a week ago says about Bo-Peep—how she lost her sheep, but got twice as many lambs?" asked North Wind, sitting down on the grass, and placing him in her lap as before. "Oh yes, I do, well enough," answered Diamond; "but I never just quite liked …

A Secret Thing

"Hard Times" is not one of the greatest books of Dickens; but it is perhaps in a sense one of his greatest monuments. It stamps and records the reality of Dickens's emotion on a great many things that were then considered unphilosophical grumblings, but which since have swelled into the immense phenomenon of the socialist …