The whole conception of the poem is the counterpart of Browning's _Easter Day_, where the soul chooses and is allowed to choose the same regions of the lesser good and beauty for its home. In that poem the soul is permitted to devote itself for ever to the finest things that earth can give--life, literature, scientific knowledge, love. The permission sends it wild with joy, and having chosen, it settles down for ever to the earth-bound life. But eternity is too long for the earth and all that is upon it. It wears time out, and all the desire of our mortality ages and grows weary. The spirit, made for immortal thoughts and loves and life, finds itself the ghastly prisoner of that which is inevitably decaying; but its immortality postpones the decent and appropriate end to an eternal mockery and doom. At last, in the tremendous close, it wakens to the unspeakable blessedness of _not_ being satisfied with anything that earth can give, and so proves itself adequate for its own inheritance of immortality. In Thompson's poem the soul is never allowed, even in dream, to rest in lower things until satiety brings disillusion. The higher destiny is swift at her heels; and ever, just as she would nestle in some new covert, she is torn from it by the imperious Best of All that claims her for its own. There is no obvious sequence of the phases of the poem, nor any logical order connecting them into a unity of experience. They may or may not be a rescript of Thompson's own inner life, but every detail might be placed in another order without the slightest loss to the meaning or the truth. The only guiding and unifying element is a purely artistic one--that of the Hound in full cry, and the unity of the poem is but that of a day's hunting. One would like to know what remote origin it is to which we owe the figure. Thompson was a Greek scholar, and some such legend as that of Actaeon may well have been in his mind. But the chase of dogs was a common horror in the Middle Ages, and many of the mediaeval fiends are dog-faced. In those days, when conscience had as yet received none of our modern soporifics, and men believed in hell, many a guilty sinner knew well the baying of the hell-hounds, masterless and bloody-fanged, that chased the souls of even good men up to the very gates of heaven. Conscience and remorse ran wild, and the Hound of Hell was a characteristic part of the machinery that made the tragedy of life so terrific in those old days. But here, by a _tour de force_ in which is summed up the entire transformation from ancient to modern thought, the hell-hounds are transformed into the Hound of Heaven. That something or some one is out after the souls of men, no man who has understood his inner life can question for a moment. But here the great doctrine is proclaimed, that the Huntsman of the soul is Love and not Hate, eternal Good and not Evil. No matter what cries may freeze the soul with horror