ry. "Know you what it is to be a child? It is to
be something very different 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