rt 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), one long poem which, in
spite of Chesterton's ever-present didactic sermonizing, is possibly
the most stirring creation he has achieved. This poem has the swing,
the vigor, the spontaneity, and, above all, the ageless simplicity of
the true narrative ballad.

Scarcely less notable is the ringing "Lepanto" from his later _Poems_
(1915) which, 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 all 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 comes...."

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.

LEPANTO[14]

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords ab