Finer, in yet a different style, is the poem _To a Poet Breaking Silence_, of which we may quote the opening lines:-- Too wearily had we and song Been left to look and left to long, Yea, song and we to long and look, Since thine acquainted feet forsook The mountain where the Muses hymn For Sinai and the Seraphim. Now in both the mountains' shine Dress thy countenance, twice divine! From Moses and the Muses draw The Tables of thy double Law! His rod-born fount and Castaly Let the one rock bring forth for thee, Renewing so from either spring The songs that both thy countries sing: Or we shall fear lest, heavened thus long, Thou should'st forget thy native song, And mar thy mortal melodies With broken stammer of the skies. Next after these poems of spiritual love come certain odes and lyrical pieces: one _To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster_, modeled, as to form, on Marvell's great ode: _A Judgment in Heaven_, in which we are permitted to see the angels "as they pelted each other with handfuls of stars"--the most clotted and inchoate poem in the volume; together with _A Corymbus for Autumn_ and _The Hound of Heaven_ which are the finest things Thompson has done. Here, with all his extravagance, which passes from the sublime to the ridiculous with all the composure of a madman, Thompson has grappled with splendid subjects splendidly. He can, it is true, say:-- Against the red throb of the sunset-heart I laid my own to beat; but he can also say (with a solemn imagery which has its precise meaning as well as its large utterance):-- I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity, Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again; But not ere him who summoneth I first have seen, enwound With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned; His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.