l, this is getting dull. I must
positively do something and that at once." Mr. Belloc's fine writing
seems to spring from an almost physical zest in the use of words and
images, to be the result of a bodily exaltation, the symbol of an
enthusiastic mind and an energetic pen. No matter by what violent shocks
the author proceeds from Danton to Napoleon, that concluding passage,
ending with the shining and magniloquent phrase, "the most splendid of
human swords," is a glorious piece of writing.

From time to time (and more frequently than the inexperienced would dare
to suppose) this zest in the world and its contents, in the normal and
insoluble problems of life, breaks into passages of sheer beauty. One
may be quoted from an essay called _The Absence of the Past_:

There was a woman of charming vivacity, whose eyes were ever ready
for laughter, and whose tone of address of itself provoked the
noblest of replies. Many loved her: all admired. She passed (I will
suppose) by this street or by that; she sat at table in such and
such a house, Gainsborough painted her; and all that time ago there
were men who had the luck to meet her and to answer her laughter
with their own. And the house where she moved is there and the
street in which she walked, and the very furniture she used and
touched with her hands you may touch with your hands. You shall
come into the rooms that she inhabited, and there you shall see
her portrait, all light and movement and grace and beatitude.

She is gone altogether, the voice will never return, the gestures
will never be seen again. She was under a law, she changed, she
suffered, she grew old, she died; and there was her place left
empty. The not living things remain; but what counted, what gave
rise to them, what made them all that they are, has pitifully
disappeared, and the greater, the infinitely greater, thing was
subject to a doom perpetually of change and at last of vanishing.
The dead surroundings are not subject to such a doom. Why?

That passage is like a piece of music, like a movement in a sonata by
Beethoven. The chords, the volume of sound are gravely added to, till
that solemn close on a single note. It is emotion, perfectly rendered,
so grave, so sincere, so restrained as to be almost inimitable. And
alike in the music of the words and sentences and in the mood which they
convey it is u