In every line of Thompson's verse one finds evidence of "the vision and the faculty divine," and when after his brief period of song that vision faded and that faculty failed, he wrote no more. Thompson wrote because he must write. Like Keats he was haunted perpetually by an image of the ideal Beauty, to which he was ever striving to attain. Poetry sometimes seems to him his curse, and not his blessing. Deaf is he to the world's tongue; He scorneth for his song The loud Shouts of the crowd. He measureth world's pleasure World's ease, as Saints might measure; For hire Just love entire. He asks, not grudging pain; And knows his asking vain, And cries Love, love, and dies, In guerdon of long duty Unowned by Love or Beauty; And goes-- Tell, tell who knows. Francis Thompson was accustomed to crest all his manuscripts with the sign of the cross; and just as all his verse may be said to have been written under the inspiration of the cross, so his life may be said to have been lived under its shadow. The Hand that wrought out his destiny must have placed over its finished work the sign of mingled shame and glory, of suffering and triumph. Life was too strong for Thompson; it crushed him beneath its hurrying feet; it stunned him with its tumults; it withheld from him the love for which his soul craved; but out of the defeat of his life rose the triumph of his verse. It seems that Thompson sank to the lowest depths of life's misery that he might rise to its highest pinnacle of inspiration. It was when pitiless London had almost crushed the life out of him, and when his eyes were blinded with pain to the things around him, that the heavenly vision was clearest. On the day when he, "poor thief of song," was nailed to his bitterest cross, he heard most clearly a voice saying, "To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise." It was in recollection of some such mood, experienced as an outcast on the London streets, that he wrote the verses, _The Kingdom of God_, found in manuscript among his papers after his death, which illustrate as well as any other single poem the extraordinary inter-blending of the seen and the unseen in his poetry. His own words about Shelley apply with equal force to himself: "He stood at the very junction lines of the visible and invisible, and could shift the points as he willed."