Here is a man who believes that great beauty is best found in the common: the common transfigured. This is the food which is the proper nourishment of man. Here peace is at hand. And yet this grasp of natural beauty in Belloc sharply points up the paradox with which the last chapter of _The Four Men_ is concerned. The more sane man becomes in taking to himself those perfections needed for his fullness, the more bewildering appears his plight. His personal integration demands the final unalienation of immortal happiness; and yet happiness eternally possessed, man’s only possible goal, is a hope and a conviction that attaches itself to the things which pass. Why, Belloc asks time and again, does the fatherland come home to us most poignantly when we are moved by the presence of mortality? Why should the symbol of the everlasting both partake of the blessedness it promises and attest thereby to its own temporal destiny? A man goes into an ancient inn hidden in the hills of South England. His soul receives a benediction and he is at peace. He finds peace _there_, Belloc continually insists. This is not the device of a litterateur. It is a reality which carries along its own inexorable insufficiency. Man feeds on being, and the being he feeds on fills him with longing. He is nourished for a little while, only to hunger again. “The Sign of the Lion,” an essay rich in grave solemnity, is given over to a consideration of this perennial dilemma. The author, again “Myself,” engages a stranger in conversation. The two sit before a great fire in the old common room, and they consider a paradox: why does man try to make the sign of eternal happiness bear the impossible dignity it signifies? These two have sought rest in this inn, and from all sides the mortality of this mirror of immortal peace floods in on them. They are filled with a somber realism. Once more, in the essay “Harbour in the North,” a stranger appears before the author. Belloc has brought his cutter under a long seawall, and he meets there another small vessel. The pilot of this ship declares that he is off to find a permanent refuge to the north in a harbour of whose fame he has heard. ... Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: “The voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten, except those things which, as we know them, reminded us of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without failing.”[14] The seaman’s stores were laid on board, and he was determined that “he should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose.” Belloc answers him from his own boat—the Ship of Mortality: “You cannot make the harbour.... It is not of this world.”[15]