Although he did not begin to bring out his work in book form until he was over 30, he is, as Harold Williams has written, "the singer of a young and romantic world, a singer even for children, understanding and perceiving as a child." De la Mare paints simple scenes of miniature loveliness; he uses thin-spun fragments of fairy-like delicacy and achieves a grace that is remarkable in its universality.

De la Mare is an astonishing joiner of words; in Peacock Pie (1913) he surprises us again and again by transforming what began as a child's nonsense-rhyme into a suddenly thrilling snatch of music. These magical poems read like lyrics of William Shakespeare rendered by Mother Goose. The trick of revealing the ordinary in whimsical colors, of catching the commonplace off its guard, is the first of De la Mare's two magics.

This poet's second gift is his sense of the supernatural, of the fantastic other-world that lies on the edges of our consciousness. The Listeners (1912) is a book that, like all the best of De la Mare, is full of half-heard whispers; moonlight and mystery seem soaked in the lines and a cool wind from Nowhere blows over them. That most magical of modern verses, "The Listeners," is an example. In this poem there is an uncanny splendor. What we have here is the effect, the thrill, the overtones of a ghost story rather than the narrative itself-the half-told adventure of some new Childe Roland heroically challenging a heedless universe.

Some of his earlier poems and stories appeared originally under the pseudonym, Walter Ramal; his most remarkable prose, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), is an addition to the permanent literature of great novels.

THE LISTENERS

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest's ferny floor.

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller's head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

"Is there anybody there?" he said.)

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, Where he stood perplexed and still./ But only a host of phantom listeners That dwelt in the lone house then Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight To that voice from the world of men: Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, That goes down to the empty hall, Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller's call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

'Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:-

"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.¡l

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

OLD SUSAN

1

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.

SILVER

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

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."

The 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) 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).

"Lepanto," from the later Poems (1915), 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 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.