One day at least, whereon my thought, enlicensed to muse, Had drooped its wing above the beached margent of the ooze, for ----_un jour q'en rêve Ma pensée abattit son vol sur une grève._ Further on, The one was of the waters; a be-radiant hymnal speech! for _L'une venait des mers; chant de gloire; hymne heureux!_ And finally, And I made question of me, to what issues are we here, Whither should tend the thwarting threads of all this ravelled gear, in place of _Et je me demandai pourquoi l'on est ici, Quel peut être après tout le but de tout ceci._ What could be more significant than this heaping up of long and extravagant and sometimes feeble words, instead of the direct language of Hugo, who in this poem, though not without a certain rhetoric, says exactly what he wants to say, and when, as in the last two lines quoted, he thinks that an almost bald simplicity will be in place, sets down his thoughts in terms of an almost bald simplicity? In this translation, Thompson has betrayed himself; he has allowed his critics to see him at work, substituting what is roundabout for what is straight-forward; what is lengthy for what is brief; what is elaborated for what is simple. Has not a similar process gone on in his own mind--how far consciously one can not tell--during the writing of his original poems? III The news comes to me on a little black-edged card that Francis Thompson died at dawn on November 13, 1907. He was a Roman Catholic, and we are asked to pray for his soul. It was a light that death could not put out, a torch that no wind could blow out in the darkness. From us indeed it is now turned away, and that little corner of the world to which the poet gives light is darkened. For Francis Thompson was one of the few poets now or lately living in whom there was some trace of that divine essence which we best symbolize by fire. Emptiness he had and extravagances, but he was a poet, and he had made of many influences a form of new beauty. Much of his speech, which has a heaped imagery unique in our time, seems to have learned its technique from an almost indiscriminate quarrying among old quarries, and is sometimes so closely copied from that which was fantastically precise in Crashaw, Donne, Vaughan, that we wonder why it was not a few centuries ago that some one said: Life is a coquetry Of Death, which wearies me, Too sure Of the armour; A tiring-room where I Death's divers garments try, Till fit Some fashion sit. No one since that time, when "conceits" could convey poetical substance, has touched so daintily on plain words, giving by the touch some transfiguring novelty. If it was a style learned, it was a style perfectly acquired, and at times equal to its original.