from the man of to-day.  It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child has its fairy godmother in its own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and to count yourself the king of infinite space.”  “To the last he [Shelley] was the enchanted child....  He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children.  The universe is his box of toys.  He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall.  He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars.  He makes bright mischief with the moon.  The meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand.  He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain.  He dances in and out of the gates of heaven; its floor is littered with his broken fancies.  He runs wild over the fields of ether.  He chases the rolling world.”  He who could write thus, and who could melt our hearts with To Monica Thought Dying and its refrain,

“A cup of chocolate,
One farthing is the rate,
You drink it through a straw, a straw, a straw”

—­surely he must have had some wonderful right of entrance into the innocent fellowships of childhood.  Still more intimate, daring in its incredible humility and simpleness, is his Ex Ore Infantium:—­

“Little Jesus, wast Thou shy
Once, and just as small as I? 
And what did it feel like to be
Out of Heaven, and just like me?... 
Hadst Thou ever any toys,
Like us little girls and boys? 
And didst Thou play in Heaven with all
The angels, that were not too tall?... 
So, a little Child, come down
And hear a child’s tongue like Thy own;
Take me by the hand and walk,
And listen to my baby-talk.”

But not even this refuge is open to the rebel soul.

“I turned me to them very wistfully;
But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
With dawning answers there,
Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.”

Driven from the fairyland of childhood, he flees, as a last resort, to Nature.  This time it is not in science that he seeks her, but in pure abandonment of his spirit to her changing moods.  He will be one with cloud and sky and sea, will be the brother of the dawn and eventide.

“I was heavy with the even,
When she lit her glimmering tapers
Round the day’s dead sanctities. 
I laughed in the morning’s eyes,
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather.”

Here again Francis Thompson is on familiar ground.  If, like Mr. Chesterton, he holds the key of fairyland, like him also he can retain through life his wonder at the grass.  His nature-poetry is nearer Shelley than anything that has been written since Shelley died.  In it