nd he noted it with
satisfaction. "Within a stone's throw of my house they are building
another house. I am glad they are building it and I am glad it is
within a stone's throw." He did not want a desert, he did not want a
large landed estate, he wanted what he had got--a house and a garden.
He adventurously explored that garden, finding a kitchen-garden that
had "somehow got attached" to the premises, and wondering why he
liked it; speaking to the gardener, "an enterprise of no little
valour," and asking him the name "of a strange dark red rose, at once
theatrical and sulky," which turned out to be called Victor Hugo;
"watching (with regret) a lot of little black pigs being turned out
of my garden."

Watching the neighbouring house grow up from its foundation he noted
in an article called, "The Wings of Stone," what was the reality of a
staircase. We pad them with carpets and rail them with banisters, yet
every "staircase is truly only an awful and naked ladder running up
into the infinite to a deadly height." (A correspondent pointed out
in a letter to the _Daily News_ that here he had touched a reality
keenly felt by primitive peoples. When Cetewayo, King of Zululand,
visited London, he would go upstairs only on hands and knees and that
with manifest terror.) The paddings of civilisation may be useful,
yet Gilbert held more valuable a realisation of the realities of
things. Vision is not fancy, but the sight of truth.

In the Notebook he had written

There are three things that make me think;
things beyond all poetry:
A yellow space or rift in evening sky:
A chimney or pinnacle high in the air;
And a path over a hill.

Chesterton had always the power of conveying in words a painter's
vision of some unforgettable scene with the poet's words for what the
artist not only sees but imagines. Such flashes became more frequent
as he looked through the doorway of his little house. Go through _The
Ball and the Cross_ with this in mind and you will see what I mean.
"The crimson seas of the sunset seemed to him like a bursting out of
some sacred blood, as if the heart of the world had broken." "There
is nothing more beautiful than thus to look as it were through the
archway of a house; as if the open sky were an interior chamber, and
the sun a secret lamp of the place." Best of all to illustrate this
special quality is a longer passage from the _Poet and the Lunatics_.

For the most part he was content