"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 "straying, 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 from "the brutish jargon we inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in the language and literature of their day. And those subtler minds who instantly perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his thought and theirs. Like them, it is true, he turned his back on the delusive splendours of the world; he accepted and expressed in song the divine ordinance of the universe. But he was afflicted with the pain of modern doubt; fear and speculative curiosity struggled with his faith; sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world, so far from proving the divine beauty, seemed to him as a possible refuge in his vain flight from the "Hound of Heaven."
He cannot be allocated to a single school. In his reading he had ranged through the poets of all ages, and he had assimilated a mighty variety of emotions, and we may see how his form shows the influence now of one poet, now another—Milton, Cowley, Shelley, Hood, Poe, and Rossetti—yet each influence, as it came upon him, was passed through the crucible of his own defined temperament, and the resultant is wholly his own, a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion, yet fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic; the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that habit of symbolism with which Rossetti and his school have made us familiar.
Sometimes his pregnant phrases, his literary imagery, his stately, sweeping rhetoric, and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us to compare him with Virgil rather than with any modern poet.
Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-mother-like,
To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st,
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,
I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,
Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off
The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun,
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.
But those last lines:
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.
we cannot compare with any model. They stand by themselves, unsurpassable, lines such as are only to be found here and there even in the great poets.