And they are disturbing thoughts …

… Some thoughts about Rudyard Kipling - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

And so it is again and again, the sense of someone who knows that the shadow may conceal a worse substance, that the noise in the night may really be something to worry about; someone who has gone at midnight down the stinking alley and seen the seething slum, who has sat at the press desk in the courtroom listening to evidence in too many murder trials, watched the cholera victims carted away to the riverbank in piles, and who is in the end far too intelligent and informed about reality to believe what he wants to believe.

Several of Kipling's poems were favorites of mine when I was a kid.