but as the sum of human and intensely individual beings:

Once I found a friend
"Dear me," I said "he was made for me."
But now I find more and more friends
Who seem to have been made for me
And more and yet more made for me,
Is it possible we were all made for each other
all over the world?

And on another page comes perhaps the most significant phrase in the
book: "I wonder whether there will ever come a time when I shall be
tired of any one person." Hence a fantastic thought of a way of
making the discovery of more people to know and to like:

THE HUMAN CIRCULATING LIBRARY NOTES

Get out a gentleman for a fortnight, then change him for a lady, or
your ticket. No person to be kept out after a fortnight, except with
the payment of a penny a day. Any person morally or physically
damaging a man will be held responsible. The library omnibus calls
once a week leaving two or three each visit. Man of the season--old
standard man.

Or better still:

My great ambition is to give a party at which everybody should meet
everybody else and like them very much.

AN INVITATION

Mr. Gilbert Chesterton
requests the pleasure
Of humanity's company
to tea on Dec. 25th 1896.
Humanity Esq., The Earth, Cosmos E.

G.K. liked everybody very much, and everything very much. He liked
even the things most of us dislike. He liked to get wet. He liked to
be tired. After that one short period of struggle he liked to call
himself "always perfectly happy." And therefore he wanted to say,
"Thank you."

You say grace before meals
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Each day seemed a special gift; something that might not have been:

EVENING

Here dies another day
During which I have had eyes, ears, hands
And the great world round me;
And with tomorrow begins another.
Why am I allowed two?

THE PRAYER OF A MAN WALKING

I thank thee, O Lord, for the stones in the street
I thank thee for the hay-carts yonder and for the
houses built and half-built
That fly past me as I stride.
But most of all for the great wind in my nostrils
As if thine own nostrils were close.