In a more commonplace style of imagery, but still splendidly handled, is the following from _Sister Songs_: Or may this treasure-galleon of my verse, Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme, Set with a towering press of fantasies, Drop safely down the time, Leaving mine isled self behind it far, Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas, (As down the years the splendour voyages From some long-ruined and night-submerged star). The foregoing extracts impress one also with another noteworthy and very important quality of Thompson's verse--its remarkable metrical effects. Watts-Dunton rightly says that in addition to intellectual and emotional life, great poetry must have rhythmic life. Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vivid, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, that passage, according to Watts-Dunton, has no right to exist as poetry. One sign by which one may know that poetry possesses rhythmic life is that passages of it will sing themselves in one's head for days after reading them. Arnold Bennett tells us that after reading _Sister Songs_ he went about for days repeating such passages as: The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, Moves all the labouring surges of the world. After reading Thompson first, I went about for days repeating over and over again passages from his poems, not for their meaning, for the meaning in many cases was not clear, but just for the sound and beat of them, such passages as: On Ararat there grew a vine... or I am Daniel's mystic mountain... Everyone knows Kipling's picture of sunrise in _Mandalay_: An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay. This is commonplace beside Thompson's version of the same thought in _The Mistress of Vision_: East, ah, east of Himalay Dwell the nations underground; Hiding from the shock of Day, For the sun's uprising sound: Dare not issue from the ground At the tumults of the Day, So fearfully the sun doth sound, Clanging up beyond Cathay, For the great earth-quaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay. Lastly, Thompson's poetry impresses one with a sense of sublimity, in the strict, literal meaning of the word, which is _upliftedness_. Thompson seems always uplifted to a high level of inspiration; his wing seems never to flag nor his voice to tire. The reason for this consistent loftiness of Thompson's poetry is probably that to Thompson the writing of poetry was an act of worship, and that the main spring of his inspiration is religious enthusiasm. He never wrote except when he felt that he must write. He was only, he says, the conduit-pipe through which flowed the divine utterance. Speaking of poets he says: We speak a lesson taught we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows.