dropping on his knees and praying in the crowded London streets. There was incongruity, verging on the indecent, in this intrusion of religion into art, as if an archangel were to attend an afternoon tea in Mayfair or an absinthe session in a Bohemian cafe. It was, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "an unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world" which struck the world dumb.

The poetry of Francis Thompson appeared in three small volumes: "Poems," published in 1893; "Sister Songs," in 1895; and "New Poems," in 1897. The first of these volumes contained the "Hound of Heaven"; though it staggered reviewers at large, they yielded dubious and carefully measured praise and waited for developments. The pack was unleashed and the hue-and-cry raised on the coming of "Sister Songs" and "New Poems." Andrew Lang and Mr. Arthur Symons led the chorus of disapproval. It is amusing to read now that Francis Thompson's "faults are fundamental. Though he uses the treasure of the Temple, he is not a religious poet. The note of a true spiritual passion never once sounds in his book." Another critic of the poet declares that "nothing could be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression it leaves on the mind. It is like a dictionary of obsolete English suffering from a severe fit of delirium tremens." A prominent literary periodical saw, in the attempt to foist Thompson on the public as a genuine poet, a sectarian effort to undermine the literary press of England. In the course of a year the sale of "Sister Songs" amounted to 349 copies. The "New Poems" fared worse; its sale, never large, practically ceased a few years after its appearance, three copies being sold during the first six months of 1902.

Across the margent of the world I fled Page 47

And all this despite strong recommendations from fastidious quarters. George Meredith's recognition was instantaneous and unreserved. Henley's was accompanied by reproofs. Mr. Richard LeGallienne was enthusiastic. Mr. William Archer said to a friend, "This is not work which can possibly be popular in the wide sense; but it is work that will be read and treasured centuries hence by those who really care for poetry." And he wrote to Thompson, "I assure you no conceivable reaction can wipe out or overlay such work as yours. It is firm-based on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say all the more confidently because it does not happen to appeal to my own speculative, or even my own literary, prejudices." The most extravagant admirer of all, and the one who will probably turn out to have come nearer the mark than any of Francis Thompson's contemporaries, was Mr. J. L. Garvin, the well known English leader-writer in politics and literature. "After the publication of his second volume," he wrote in the English Bookman, March 1897, "when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets. The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature. The 'Hound of Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' are the second greatest; and there is no third. In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography.... Even with the greatest pages of 'Sister Songs' sounding in one's ears, one is sometimes tempted to think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's high-water mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import—if we do damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he thrusts the word upon us. We do not think we forget any of the splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language. It fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad music of humanity. It is the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas à Kempis.... The regal air, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, Mr. Thompson has them all. A rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius has never been known to poetry. To many this will seem the simple delirium of over-emphasis. The writer signs for those others, nowise ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a living poet, Francis Thompson."

We do not associate Mr. Arnold Bennett with any of the ideas in religion or literature which supplied impulse to Francis Thompson. It is a surprise of the first magnitude to find him carried away into the rapture of prophecy by the "Sister Songs." "I declare," he says in an article appearing in July, 1895, "that for three days after this book appeared I read nothing else. I went about repeating snatches of it—snatches such as—

'The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.'

My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the 'Lotus Eaters' and the songs in the 'Princess,' and I think I can match them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at an ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary prosaic crown. I fear that in thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly outraging the canons of criticism. For the man is alive, he gets up of a morning like common mortals, not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet must not be called great until he is dead or very old. Well, please yourself what you think. But, in time to come, don't say I didn't tell you." A whole generation of men has passed away since these words appeared; but they do not seem to be so fantastic and whimsical now as they seemed to be then.

I said to dawn: Be sudden Page 47

It can scarcely be claimed that the prophecies of Meredith, Mr. Garvin, and Mr. Arnold Bennett were of the kind which ultimately assures the event. The reading-world dipped curiously into the pages about which there was so much conflict of opinion; it was startled and bewildered by a novel and difficult form of verse; and finally it agreed with the majority of critics that it was mostly nonsense—too Catholic to be catholic. The poems sold badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best. It is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time. Even Thompson's coreligionists were cold. Indeed, it may be said they were the coldest. If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the Catholic public feared him for his art. It was a wild unfettered thing which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be trusted to run in divine grooves. One can afford to extenuate the attitude of reserve. It was a period when brilliant heterodoxies and flaunting decadence were in the air. The fact is, that critics and public delivered Thompson over to the Catholics; and the Catholics would have nothing to do with him. Canon Sheehan could write of Thompson in 1898:

"Only two Catholics—literary Catholics—have noticed this surprising genius—Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell. The vast bulk of our coreligionists have not even heard his name, although it is