traying,
strange and deplorable, of the spirit," when he rebelled petulantly
but not ungenerously against the order of the world, and when he
soared with the cloud or the skylark like the "child-like peoples
among whom mythologies have their rise." In his poetry "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 his tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright
mischief with the moon."

And, in the same, full way, Thompson explains in what sense Shelley
was a poet of Nature; in what manner images poured naturally from his
lips as they ought to have done, but never did, pour from the lips of
the metaphysical poets; by what "instinctive perception of the
underlying analogies, the secret subterranean passages, between matter
and soul," he was able to make such imaginative play with
abstractions; and, finally, how in his shorter poems he "forgets for a
while all that ever makes his verse turbid; forgets that he is
anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he is anything but a
child." And all the time the essayist is dropping phrases which surely
are unforgettable, striking us alike by their truth and their
pregnance--"this beautiful, wild, feline poetry, wild because left to
range the wilds."--"His Muse has become a veritable Echo, whose body
has dissolved from about her voice."--"He stood thus at the very
junction-lines of the visible and the invisible, and could shift the
points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing
with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse."

Even to-day, five years after his death, Thompson has not attained the
full fame which he merits. It is true his very first book won the
highest praise from critics no less distinguished than Coventry
Patmore, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Mr. H.D. Traill, and long before his
death it was no small circle of admirers who looked eagerly for each
new poem from his pen.

Yet his genius is not of that kind which instantly communicates itself
to a generation. Living apart in a spiritual atmosphere of his own,
his heart divested of the desires which form half the life of most
men, his gaze was fixed on the inner mysteries of the spirit and on
those outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty. The very language
he used was as far remote as possible