praise was conveyed by the chance allusion he lighted on later in Lady Burne-Jones's biography of her husband: "The winter's labour," she says, "was cheered by the appearance of a small volume of poems by an author whose name (Francis Thompson) was till then unknown to us. The little book moved him to admiration and hope." And, speaking of The Hound of Heaven, Burne-Jones himself said: "Since Gabriel's 'Blessed Damozel' no mystical words have so touched me. Shall I ever forget how I undressed and dressed again, and had to undress again—a thing I most hate—because I could think of nothing else?"

Sister Songs, published in 1895—the poem of which Mr William Archer has said that "Shelley would have adored it"—is a poem to read aloud; for sound and sense herein celebrate their divine nuptials. One of the high memories of the present writer is that of hearing it so read by Mr George Wyndham at the hearthstone of Byron's granddaughter. The lines therein that deal with sex, dormant in the child-girl, yielded the poet perhaps his most amazing imagery. "Superabundance," murmured some—surely a "fault" as happy as was ever son of Adam's. The charge of obscurity brought against the poem was more apt; for who that did not know of his days—and his nights—in the London streets, could follow such a poignant piece of autobiography as this?

And how shall that final episode be turned more explicitly? There are still a few things left that cannot be uttered, or, if uttered, that become the counterpart, even for the willing ear, of that "tenuity of the bat's cry" reported to elude the common hearing. It is even as Balzac, great talker himself, says, that everything (especially theology I think) is the cheaper for being discussed. Yet this untold story transcends the mere romance of De Quincey's Ann, and might, indeed, for a moment, reverse Rossetti's just indictment of the life of "Jenny"—"It makes a goblin of the sun." For this "flower fallen from the budded coronal of Spring" took root and flourished, even in London mire, and again the fragrant petals unfolded and the greenery grew.

In New Poems Francis Thompson put forth in The Mistress of Vision his stark gospel of renunciation . It is the last word of an asceticism which he practised as well as preached—most strait in its abnegation of everything but the beauty his verse, unlike his life, never could renounce. Coventry Patmore, Thompson's true "Captain of Song," used to say that the young poet's prose was even finer than his poetry, and his talk better than both. This was a statement with the true Patmorean touch of paradox. Any way, the talk had no reporter, and of his prose—his "heroic prose," as it has been called—only one example passed, during his life, into book form—the complaint made by Brother Ass, the Body, against its rider, the Soul. This was published under the title of Health and Holiness, accompanied by a Note from Father Tyrrell. But his experiences in prose, as a reviewer, were wide as his sympathies, and these were sanely universal. His articles in The Academy, under Mr Lewis Hind's editorship, must choke up many a scrapbook. Later, his contributions to The Athenæum afforded him his greatest scope and stimulant; and only with his death came the eclipse of his powers. Editors forbore to be angry at his delays, for, after a while of waiting, they got from him, at last, what none else could give at all.

About ten weeks before the darkness fell on him the little flame of his life began visibly to flicker. A change to the country was advised; and he became the carefully tended guest of Mr Wilfrid Blunt—not many miles from the Storrington of his early love, to which, however, not wild arabs could any longer draw him. He was too weak for any travel, save that which brought him back to London—better, he himself said, but surely dying, as it seemed to solicitous eyes.

Ten days before his death he went as a private patient to the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, in St John's Wood, and there, at the age of forty-eight, on November 13, 1907, he passed away at dawn—the dawn that was the death-hour in his Dream Tryst. He was laid to rest in St Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin were roses from the garden of Mr George Meredith, inscribed with Mr Meredith's testimony, "A true poet, one of the small band"; and violets from kindred turf went to the dead poet's breast from the hand of her whose praises he had divinely sung. Devoted friends lament him, no less for himself than for his singing. He made all men his
debtors, leaving to those who loved him the
memory of a unique personality, and
to English poetry an
imperishable
name.

W.M.

Reprinted, with revisions,
from The Athenæum
of November 23, 1907.

DEDICATION OF "POEMS"

To WILFRID AND ALICE MEYNELL