For whom more rude than a beggar's rhyme in the gutter
These songs were sung.

"The Return of Eve" exemplified a favourite thought of his: when the
journalist keeps repeating that the life of religion does not lie in
dusty dogmas we should stop him with a great shout, for he is wrong
at the very start. It is from the seed of dogma and from that seed
alone that all the Powers of art and poetry and devotion spring. In
the days of his boyhood, when he thought of Our lady with a vague
and confused respect as _"The_ Madonna" he could not have written
"The Return of Eve." That flower came from the seed of the doctrine of
the Immaculate Conception.

Our lady is the Mother of God and our Mother: this doctrine blossomed
as he wrote:

I found One hidden in every home
A voice that sings about the house.
A nurse that scares the nightmares off
A mother nearer than a spouse

Whose picture once I saw; and there
Wild as of old and weird and sweet
In sevenfold splendour blazed the moon
Not on her brow; beneath her feet.

This poem, "The White Witch" has in it a mingling of the old
classical stories of his boyhood and the new light of Christian
reality. In _The Everlasting Man_ he saw the myths as hunger and the
Faith as bread. Men's hearts today were withered because they had
forgotten to eat their bread. The hunger of the pagans was a
healthier thing than the jaded sterility of the modern world. Our
Lady was ready to give that world the Bread of Life once more. And as
he meditated on the mystery of the Virgin Birth he saw God making
purity creative. She alone who overcame all heresies could overcome
the hideous heresy of birth prevention.

That Christ from this creative purity
Came forth your sterile appetites to scorn.
So: in her house Life without Lust was born,
So in your house Lust without Life shall die.

"Gaude, Virgo Maria, cunctas haereses sola interemisti." Was this
phrase from Our Lady's office ringing in Gilbert's mind as he sang of
the Seven Champions of Christendom disarmed and worsted in the fight,
going back to Our Lady to find that she had hidden their swords where
the gospels tell us she hid and pondered all things--in her heart?
From her wounded heart, Mary takes the seven swords to rearm the
saints who have to reconquer the earth.

Certainly he must often have thought of the Litany. So many verses
are based on it. Our Lord as a baby climbs the Ivory Tower of His