all the old simple things have been painted or
written, and they will only have meaning for us again when a new race or
a new civilisation has made us look upon all with new eyesight.

IN THE SERPENT'S MOUTH

There is an old saying that God is a circle whose centre is everywhere.
If that is true, the saint goes to the centre, the poet and artist to
the ring where everything comes round again. The poet must not seek for
what is still and fixed, for that has no life for him; and if he did his
style would become cold and monotonous, and his sense of beauty faint
and sickly, as are both style and beauty to my imagination in the prose
and poetry of Newman, but be content to find his pleasure in all that is
for ever passing away that it may come again, in the beauty of woman, in
the fragile flowers of spring, in momentary heroic passion, in whatever
is most fleeting, most impassioned, as it were, for its own perfection,
most eager to return in its glory. Yet perhaps he must endure the
impermanent a little, for these things return, but not wholly, for no
two faces are alike, and, it may be, had we more learned eyes, no two
flowers. Is it that all things are made by the struggle of the
individual and the world, of the unchanging and the returning, and that
the saint and the poet are over all, and that the poet has made his home
in the Serpent's mouth?

THE BLACK AND THE WHITE ARROWS

Instinct creates the recurring and the beautiful, all the winding of the
serpent; but reason, the most ugly man, as Blake called it, is a drawer
of the straight line, the maker of the arbitrary and the impermanent,
for no recurring spring will ever bring again yesterday's clock.
Sanctity has its straight line also, darting from the centre, and with
these arrows the many-coloured serpent, theme of all our poetry, is
maimed and hunted. He that finds the white arrow shall have wisdom older
than the Serpent, but what of the black arrow. How much knowledge, how
heavy a quiver of the crow-feathered ebony rods can the soul endure?

HIS MISTRESS'S EYEBROWS

The preoccupation of our Art and Literature with knowledge, with the
surface of life, with the arbitrary, with mechanism, has arisen out of
the root. A careful, but not necessarily very subtle man could foretell
the history of any religion if he knew its first principle, and that it
would live long enough to fulfil itself. The mind can never do the same
thing twice over, a