st eclipse the sea
Shall stand up like a tower,
Above all moons made dark and riven,
Hold up its foaming head in heaven,
And laugh, knowing its hour.

But, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful
lines. _The Ballad of the White Horse_ is an epic of the struggle
between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that
its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would
have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the
Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would
have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the
madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard.
Chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the _White Horse_
behave like gentlemen. There is a beautiful little song put into the
mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the
inadequacy of false gods.

There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.

The thing on the blind side of the heart,
On the wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring;
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.

The sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere,
than the lines of that over-quoted verse of Swinburne's:

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods there be--
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

This is insincere, because a pagan (as Swinburne was) could have
committed suicide had he really felt these things. Swinburne, like most
modern pagans, really hated priestcraft when he thought he was hating
God. Chesterton's note is truer. He knows that the pagan has all the
good things of life but one, and that only an exceptionally nice pagan
knows he lacks that much.

And so one might go on mining the _White Horse_, for it contains most
things, as a good epic should. Two short stanzas, however, sho