were those making up the
University of Notre Dame where he had been lecturing and which turned
his musings in a direction they were ever inclined to take. Founded
by a group of Frenchmen a century ago with a capital of four hundred
dollars in a small log building on a clearing of ten acres, the
University today numbers forty-five buildings on a seventeen hundred
acre campus. The gold dome of the Church visible from miles away, the
interesting combination of the extraordinary fame of its football
team with a keen spiritual life, especially fascinated Gilbert. He
wrote a poem dedicated to the University and called "The Arena." In
it he pictures first the golden image on "the gilded house of Nero"
that stood for all the horrors of the Pagan Amphitheatre. Then comes
in contrast another image:

I have seen, where a strange country
Opened its secret plains about me,
One great golden dome stand lonely with its golden image, one
Seen afar, in strange fulfilment,
Through the sunlit Indian summer
That Apocalyptic portent that has clothed her with the Sun.

The boys shout "Notre Dame" as they watch the fortunes of the fray
and Chesterton sees Our Lady presiding fittingly even over a football
contest.

And I saw them shock the whirlwind
Of the world of dust and dazzle:
And thrice they stamped, a thunderclap; and thrice the sand-wheel
swirled;
And thrice they cried like thunder
On Our Lady of the Victories,
The Mother of the Master of the Masterers of the World.

He recurs to a favourite thought that the Mother of Sorrows is the
cause of human joy:

Queen of Death and deadly weeping
Those about to live salute thee,
Youth untroubled; youth untortured; hateless war and harmless mirth
And the New Lord's larger largesse
Holier bread and happier circus,
Since the Queen of Sevenfold Sorrow has brought joy upon the earth.

No wonder that, as Johnnie Mangan said, you could not drag him away
from the game, if the game meant also a meditation. The "holier
bread" came perhaps to his mind from the fact that the average of
Daily Communion is unusually high at Notre Dame.

When he desired for Americans a return to their great political
vision he desired also an opening of the eyes to that greater
spiritual vision which was to him the supreme opportunity of the
human spirit. E. S. P. Haynes in _Fritto Misto_, comments on the
absence of any reference to universities in _Wha