Chesterton’s vision was metaphysical, as Mr. Hugh Kenner has suggested;[16] broadly speaking, it was mystical as well. The same cannot be said of Belloc. His vision is more poetic than metaphysical. On one level almost a rationalist, on another level—the level that finds him communicating with the world in which he exists—he is profoundly tender and awed before the loveliness of creation. It is the mark of a philosopher that he can see significance apart from the symbol, whereas it is characteristic of the poet to cling fast to the concrete structure of his intuition. Belloc is too much in love with things to use them as stepping-stones to eternity. He sees eternity in their very passing, and this is the root of the much-misunderstood Bellocian irony. Throughout most of his better essays and in his masterpieces such as _The Path to Rome_ and _Hills and the Sea_ one can sense an awesomeness and love of finite beauty that reveals itself in a style chaste and unadorned in its expression of tenderness and reverence before the things which are. Belloc drank at the sources of great rivers. He worshipped the tides. Belloc saw things, but Chesterton saw through them. This is not to say that one is greater than the other, but it is to declare their fundamental difference. Belloc’s close union with the passing universe heightens the great classical humanist dilemma that underlies all his thought: man is threatened by death. Like everything genuinely classical, this is a universally human paradox. The more fully does man achieve his earthly destiny and bring to a certain pitch of perfection and actuality the possibilities originally latent within him, the more fully is he aware of the irony of temporal existence. From this follows the perennial preoccupation with the passing of beauty and the inevitability of death. Genuinely Roman, the vigour and the iron ring of the Bellocian affirmations are tempered in a lyricism before the _lacrimae rerum_, and are frequently mellowed in somber meditation on the great fact of death. In his biographies, Belloc brings to the famous death scenes of history a heightened sensibility born of that prolonged consideration. Read of the execution of Danton written in the fires of early youth; of the murder of King Charles I of England; of the conversion of the second Charles on the point of death. Read in _Elizabethan Commentary_, one of his final books, that passage in which he attempts to guess at the heart of his subject, and, in so doing, reveals himself: “She felt that she was ceasing to be herself and that is what probably most of us will feel when the moment comes to reply to the summons of Azrael.”[17]