Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they were words instead of drops. It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me. Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death. They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit. I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson. ERNEST DOWSON