knows how, in the children of Alice and Wilfrid Meynell, Thompson found one of his inspirations. He has left, as a memorial of his love for them, the verses to his God-child, Francis Meynell; also a lovely fantasy, "The Making of Viola"; the whole of Sister Songs; "The Poppy"; and that uniquely haunting poem "To Monica Thought Dying," with its image of Death holding state among the little broken playthings, thrice in-tolerable with "this dreadful childish babble on his tongue." In a niche of its own must stand that exquisite "Ex Ore Infantium"—
Little Jesus, wast Thou shy
Once, and just so small as I?
And what did it feel like to be
Out of Heaven, and just like me?—
of which no detached page can hope to reproduce the tender gaiety. It recalls nothing so much as one of Crashaw's divinely human touches, his marvelling
That He whom the sun serves should faintly peepe
Through clouds of Infant flesh: that He, the old
Eternall Word should be a Child, and weepe.
Manifestly, Thompson's viewpoint (the viewpoint of verses such as "Daisy" and "The Poppy") is very far from being a childlike one. But his are the musings of one who, having known the full measure of manhood—having known life and love and the grave—has still a heart meet for "the nurseries of Heaven."
We have already suggested the inevitable thing: and now, perforce, we remember that one of the first—yea, and one of the last—titles laid by appreciative critics at our poet's feet was, "the greater Crashaw." It is as deceptive as such generalisations have, in the main, proved them-
