o its theme with tremulous beauty.

Mr. Wyndham, I think, did not go far from the truth when he said that
this "is the most important contribution to pure letters written in
English during the last twenty years." For in a certain sense it seems
to reach an even greater height than Thompson's poetry. For whilst he
has written exalted poetry, thought-compelling poetry, magnificent in
diction and appealing to the deeper emotions, there is in this essay a
simplicity which was often lacking in the former, and a passionate
pleading which combines the cogent lucidity of a Newman with the
other-worldness of a St. Francis. If it has a fault, it is that of
being too rich in its imagery, too lavish of its judgments, too
overbearing in its vision of beauty, so that some critics will say
that it is too poetical for prose. It is, indeed, the prose of a poet,
and such as only a poet would or could write; but its harmony, its
structural balance, its masterly transitions are, save in a few cases,
those which are proper to prose.

There is, perhaps, something a little forced in the opening passage in
which he commends the services of poetry to the charity of the Church,
paragraphs which were designed to conciliate the editor of the _Dublin
Review_. He passes to consider the defect which has "mildewed" all the
poetry written since Shelley, "the predominance of art over
inspiration, of body over soul." Not, he holds, that inspiration has
been lacking--"the warrior is there, but he is hampered by his
armour." "We are self-conscious to the finger-tips; and this inherent
quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity,
ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be born to us
of the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among us no
reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children
cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially
a child."

"To the last," he exclaims, "he was the enchanted child." And he
explains what he means in words that may seem fantastic: "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." And
he suggests that "Shelley never could have been a man, for he never
was a boy. And the reason lay in the persecution which over-clouded
his school days." He was a grown-up child when he sailed his paper
boats on the Isis, when in his loves he gave way to that "s