hour. We, of this self-conscious, incredulous generation, sentimentalise
our children, analyse our children, think we are endowed with a special
capacity to sympathise 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.