There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue. There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse. That is her beautiful gift to us. FRANCIS THOMPSON If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms. London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days, living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.