They should not hear from me a word Of selfishness or scorn If only I could find the door If only I were born.
He makes the Unborn Babe say this in his first volume of poems. And in the Notebook we see how the babe coming into the world must keep this promise by accepting life with its puzzles, its beauty, its fleetingness: "Are we all dust? What a beautiful thing dust is though." "This round earth may be a soap-bubble, but it must be admitted that there are some pretty colours on it." "What is the good of life, it is fleeting; what is the good of a cup of coffee, it is fleeting. Ha Ha Ha."
The birthday present of birth, as he was later to call it in _Orthodoxy_, involved not bare existence only but a wealth of other gifts. "A grievance," he heads this thought:
Give me a little time, I shall not be able to appreciate them all; If you open so many doors And give me so many presents, O Lord God.
He is almost overwhelmed with all that he has and with all that is, but accepts it ardently in its completeness.
If the arms of a man could be a fiery circle embracing the round world, I think I should be that man.
Yet in the face of all this splendour the pessimist dares to find flaws:
The mountains praise thee, O Lord! But what if a mountain said, "I praise thee; But put a pine-tree halfway up on the left It would be much more effective, believe me." It is time that the religion of prayer gave place to the religion of praise.
If the mountains must praise God, if the religion of praise expresses the truth of things, how much more does it express the truth of humanity--or rather of men, for he saw humanity not as an abstraction 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:
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.