e and identify ourselves with children; we play at
being children. And the result is that we are not more child-like, but
our children are less child-like. It is so tiring to stoop to the child,
so much easier to lift the child up to you. 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; it is

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour;

it is to know not as yet that you are under sentence of life, nor
petition that it be commuted into death. When we become conscious in
dreaming that we dream, the dream is on the point of breaking; when we
become conscious in living that we live, the ill dream is but just
beginning. Now if Shelley was but too conscious of the dream, in other
respects Dryden's false and famous line might have been applied to him
with very much less than it's usual untruth. {5} To the last, in a
degree uncommon even among poets, he retained the idiosyncrasy of
childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last he
was the enchanted child.

This was, as is well known, patent in his life. It is as really, though
perhaps less obviously, manifest in his poetry, the sincere effluence of
his life. And it may not, therefore, be amiss to consider whether it was
conditioned by anything beyond his congenital nature. For our part, we
believe it to have been equally largely the outcome of his early and long
isolation. Men given to retirement and abstract study are notoriously
liable to contract a certain degree of childlikeness: and if this be the
case when we segregate a man, how much more when we segregate a child! It
is when they are taken into the solution of school-life that children, by
the reciprocal interchange of influence with their fellows, undergo the
series of reactions which converts them from children into boys and from
boys into men. The intermediate stage must be traver