Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little volume called “A Picked Company” where Mr. E.V.  Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc’s pieces.  Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight—­in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life so sweet.  Hear him on “A Great Wind”: 

A great wind is every man’s friend, and its strength is the strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something worthy and well chosen.  It is health in us, I say, to be full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed.  No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him.  It is as though he had experienced armies.  The days of high winds are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man.  And the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship are at their noblest.

IV

And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc’s prose seem but ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer’s service in reminding us of the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay.  Let us thank him for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music: 

    I never get between the pines
      But I smell the Sussex air;
    Nor I never come on a belt of sand
      But my home is there. 
    And along the sky the line of the Downs
      So noble and so bare.

    A lost thing could I never find,
      Nor a broken thing mend: 
    And I fear I shall be all alone
      When I get towards the end. 
    Who will there be to comfort me
      Or who will be my friend?

    I will gather and carefully make my friends
      Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
    They watch the stars from silent folds,
      They stiffly plough the field. 
    By them and the God of the South Country
      My poor soul shall be healed.

    If I ever become a rich man,
      Or if ever I grow to be old,
    I will build a house with deep thatch
      To shelter me from the cold,
    And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
      And the story of Sussex told.