In _The Blue Bird_ of Maeterlinck we are told of a child who puts on a magic hat and turns a fairy diamond and sees all that was ugly and sordid transformed into something transcendently beautiful. There was no need for Francis Thompson to find a magic hat; the poetic instinct which was always with him gave him the insight into another poet's nature; he saw through, around, and beyond those unlovely passages in the life of Shelley which made Matthew Arnold, for once so strangely an adherent of Mrs. Grundy, exclaim, "What a set! What a world!" There are few appreciations in the English language comparable to his essay on Shelley. Fixing his eyes on what seems to him essential in the man, Thompson finds that everything else explains itself to the observer who will see with the poet, who can understand his sufferings, and imagine his delights. And so his essay is no ordinary study in criticism. He sets himself, indeed, as Pater would have done, to find what it is that makes the specific worth of the poet. But there is no laborious calculating of values; rather a lavish pouring forth of the just meed of praise, an interpretation, a vindication of Shelley, like Swinburne's vindication of Blake, in language less passionate, perhaps, but more perfect in its melody, and more significant in its imagery, responding to 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.