"For this is the second death of the gods- a death after resurrection. And when a ghost dies, it dies eternally."

From a review for the Bookman (December 1899), describing the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin.

It was one of Chesterton's earliest writings, written when he was 25.

When paganism was re-throned at the Renaissance, it proved itself for the first time a religion by the sign that only its own worshippers could slay it. It has taken them three centuries, but they have thrashed it threadbare. Just as poets invoked Mars and Venus, for every trivial flirtation, so Poussin and his school multiplied nymphs and satyrs with the recurrence of an endless wall-paper, till a bacchanal has become as respectable as a bishop and the god of love is too vulgar for a valentine...This is the root of the strange feeling of sadness evoked by the groups and landscapes of Poussin. We are looking at one of the dead loves of the world. Never were men born so much out of the time as the modern neo-pagans. For this is the second death of the gods- a death after resurrection. And when a ghost dies, it dies eternally.