There is, perhaps, something a little forced in the opening passage in which he commends the services of poetry to the charity of the Church, paragraphs which were designed to conciliate the editor of the _Dublin Review_. He passes to consider the defect which has "mildewed" all the poetry written since Shelley, "the predominance of art over inspiration, of body over soul." Not, he holds, that inspiration has been lacking--"the warrior is there, but he is hampered by his armour." "We are self-conscious to the finger-tips; and this inherent quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity, ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be born to us of the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among us no reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially a child." "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."