“Chesterton tosses out his thoughts in a glorious liberality; but I am proud to think that this line unconsciously found its way into two of Chesterton’s poems afterwards—‘The House of Christmas,’ where he speaks of ‘the things that cannot be, and that are,’ and the splendid lyric ‘Second Childhood,’ where he says,
“‘And stones still shine along the roads
That are and cannot be!’
“Like most men of genius he kept his own immortal childhood all his life; and it was in the matrix of it, the vision that ‘saw’ as a manifestation of something ‘supernatural,’ ‘something that ultimately defied reason, not because it was merely difficult to understand, but because it rested on an eternal and absolute mystery (above and beyond the range of secondary causes) it was in this wonder at the abiding in the terrestrial that he made me feel the power of his faith,
“‘When all my days are ending
And I have no songs to sing
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything,
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing—