Strange crawling carpets of the grass
Wide windows of the sky—’
“One of the greatest of all his poems is the sonnet entitled ‘The Convert,’ in which he describes how, after he had ‘bowed his head,’ he came out where the old world shone white, and heard ‘myriads of tongues like autumn leaves,’ ‘not so loveable,’ but ‘strange and light,’ in their whispering assumption that, among the old riddles and new creeds, he must now be taken as belonging to a dead past. He sees them singing—not harshly—‘but softly as men smile about the dead.’ And then comes this magnificent and soul-stirring challenge from the ‘dead man’,
“‘The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree.
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That holds the soil, but lets the gold go free;
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus, and I live!’”
Francis B. Thornton, the authority on Gerard Manley Hopkins, first knew Chesterton through his drinking songs, “An admirable introduction; they were so much more than their title signifies, and they transported me to the happy age which preceded the Malvolios and their hatred of cakes and ale. To me Chesterton will always be the poet. He not only saw what other men looked at, he saw through as well, and it was this faculty which gave an angelic quality to his humor. He was like a bull in a china shop, but it was a papal bull enunciating principles in the midst of a wreck of fragile half-truth.”