src="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@30730@30730-h@images@img-024.jpg" alt="Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! ..... smitten me to my knee; I am defenceless utterly" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}img"/>

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
..... smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly Page 55]

The unpromising aspect of the manuscript, thus introduced, was the occasion of editorial neglect for some months. When at last Mr. Meynell gave it his attention he was electrified into action. He wrote to the address given by Thompson. The letter was returned from the dead-letter office after many days. Then he published one of the poems mentioned in the letter, "The Passion of Mary," in the hope that the author would disclose his whereabouts. The plan succeeded and brought a letter from Thompson with a new address. Mr. Meynell tried to waylay him at the new address, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane, but with characteristic shiftlessness the poet forgot to call there for possible letters. But the seller of drugs finally established communications between the editor and the poet, and one day, more than a year after Thompson's first literary venture had been sent, he visited the office of Merry England. Mr. Everard Meynell, the poet's biographer, thus describes the entrance of the poet into his father's sanctum. "My father was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him. 'Show him up,' he said, and was left alone. Then the door opened, and a strange hand was thrust in. The door closed, but Thompson had not entered. Again it opened, again it shut. At the third attempt a waif of a man came in. No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes, he found my father at a loss for words. 'You must have had access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said. 'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails. I had no books by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be done for him at that interview save the extraction of a promise to call again. He made none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking sympathy and alms. He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans for his benefit, and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would enable him to sleep in a bed and sit at a table."

By patience and delicately offered kindnesses Mr. and Mrs. Meynell at length won the difficult privilege of helping the shy, nervous, high-strung spirit wandering in pain, hunger and exile amid the indecencies of extreme penury in a great city. They were helped by the friendly sympathy and care of Premonstratensian and Franciscan monks. Thompson had sounded, and become familiar with, the depths of social degradation in all its external aspects of sordidness. The most extraordinary part of his singular experience is that he affords a striking instance of the triumph of soul and mind over beleaguering circumstance. The nightmare of his environment failed to subdue him. He preserved his spiritual sensitiveness, and literary ideals of a most exalted kind, through the most depressing and demoralizing experiences. The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell, entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could walk unstained among the world's impurities. "Bring back then, I say, in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on the cheek. But you cannot bring back the best age of Paganism, the age when Paganism was a faith. None will again behold Apollo in the forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the long lustre of her golden locks. But you may bring back—dii avertant omen—the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and Statius, and Juvenal; of much philosophy, and little belief; of superb villas and superb taste; of banquets for the palate in the shape of cookery, and banquets for the eye in the shape of art; of poetry singing dead songs on dead themes with the most polished and artistic vocalisation; of everything most polished, from the manners to the marble floors; of vice carefully drained out of sight, and large fountains of virtue springing in the open air;—in one word, a most shining Paganism indeed—as putrescence also shines." Unlike George Gissing and so many others who had to wade to celebrity through sloughs of bitter destitution, Francis Thompson felt no inclination to capitalize his expert knowledge of back streets and alleys for profit and the morbid entertainment of the curious. His single failing in yielding to the attraction of an insidious drug seemed to be impotent to affect his high admirations and his clear perceptions in the regions of honor and religion.

Yea, faileth now even dream
The dreamer Page 55]

It is surely one of the literary glories of a distinguished family that Mr. and Mrs. Meynell succeeded in helping Thompson to emancipate himself from the enslavement of a tyrannic habit. His poetic genius began to flower in the new liberty. For the next ten years interest in his poetry and literary friends and connections, few and select, made his life comparatively happy. But he maintained a large measure of independence to the last. That he was never ungrateful to those who befriended him, his poems are ample proof. But in London he always had his own lodgings in a cheap but respectable quarter of the city. His unpunctual and preoccupied manner sometimes created small distresses for his devoted friends to relieve. During the last ten years of his life he wrote little poetry. His vitality, never vigorous, was ebbing and unequal to the demands of inspired verse. But during these years of decline he wrote much golden prose. He was a regular and highly valued contributor to the Academy, the Athenaeum, the Nation, and the Daily Chronicle. One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work. The published volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope to scale. In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose seems to be carried off its feet, as it were, in a very storm of poetic impulse. The published essays are not a tithe of Thompson's writings for the press. Moreover, we have a study of Blessed John de la Salle, a little volume on "Health and Holiness," and a large "Life of St. Ignatius Loyola," none of them suggesting even remotely the plantigrade writing of the mechanical hack.

During the last year of his life, when consumption had almost completely undermined resistance, his old habit reasserted its empire. But it was not for long, and can hardly be said to have hastened the end, which came on November 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth. He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, and on his coffin were roses from George Meredith's garden, with the poet-novelist's message: "A true poet, one of the small band."

The "Hound of Heaven" has been called the greatest ode in the English language. Such was the contemporary verdict of some of the most respected critics of the time, and the conviction of its justness deepens with the passing of years. Recall the writers of great odes, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Collins, Wordsworth, Keats,