The Work of this World

The childlike, the essential, the divine notion of serving, with their everyday will and being, the will of the living one, who lived for them that they might live, as once he had died for them that they might die, ripened in them to a Christianity that saw God everywhere, saw that everything had to …

Realism, and the Partisans of the Prosaic

If you throw enough mud, some of it will stick, especially to that unfortunate creature Man, who was originally made of mud. A realistic novel is written by stringing together all the tag-ends of human life - all the trains we miss, all the omnibuses we run after without catching, all the appointments that miscarry, …

The Shadow Bride

There was a man who dwelt alone, As day and night went past He sat as still as carven stone, And yet no shadow cast. The white owls perched upon his head Beneath the winter moon; They wiped their beaks and thought him dead Under the stars of June. There came a lady clad in …

Images, and the Paradisal Stop

Whether these images [of the lands and characters of Milton’s poem] come to us from real spiritual perception or from pre-natal and infantile experience confusedly remmbered, is not here in question; how the poet arouses them, perfects them, and makes them re-act on one another in our minds is the critic’s concern. I use the …

Four Janes

When Jane left the hilltop village of St. Anne’s and came down to the station she found that, even down there, the fog had begun to lift. Great windows had opened in it, and as the train carried her on it passed repeatedly through pools of afternoon sunlight. During this journey she was so divided …