He cannot be allocated to a single school. In his reading he had ranged through the poets of all ages, and he had assimilated a mighty variety of emotions, and we may see how his form shows the influence now of one poet, now another--Milton, Cowley, Shelley, Hood, Poe, and Rossetti--yet each influence, as it came upon him, was passed through the crucible of his own defined temperament, and the resultant is wholly his own, a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion, yet fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic; the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that habit of symbolism with which Rossetti and his school have made us familiar. Sometimes his pregnant phrases, his literary imagery, his stately, sweeping rhetoric, and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us to compare him with Virgil rather than with any modern poet. Under this dreadful brother uterine, This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come, Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-mother-like, To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st, Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike, I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel, Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing, And break the tomb of life; here I shake off The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun, And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows. But those last lines: And to the antique order of the dead I take the tongueless vows. we cannot compare with any model. They stand by themselves, unsurpassable, lines such as are only to be found here and there even in the great poets. The more one reads this poetry of Thompson's the more one discovers that it is something essentially individual. Harmonies that one may miss on a first reading become more apparent and more insistent as one reads again, and the exquisite, haunting melody of his verse pursues us, and its faultless, rich rhythms seem to create new patterns of form. One may miss not a little of his thought, because the engrossing beauty of the language lays hold of the senses. In almost every poem one finds some lingering phrase: Whatso looks lovelily Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain. Or: The little sweetness making grief complete. Often he shows that exact sense of lyrical fitness which Milton pre-eminently possessed, and, second only to him, Shelley. We see it in the passage which begins: