_Arras'd in purple_ like the house of kings, the regal heart that comes at last To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm Statelily lodge. Possibly the sorrow of filial duty unperformed--a sorrow deeper with him than is common among such predestined delinquents--aggravated the bodily ailments which already beset him; and drastic indeed were the remedies he himself prescribed. "Physician, heal thyself": the dire taunt took flesh, as it were, in Francis Thompson, and his plight was visible to all men. Himself he could not save. Biography strangely repeats itself, not in common mental experience only, but also in uncovenanted details of fact and incident. Like De Quincey, whose writings he took into his blood, Thompson had a nervous illness in Manchester; like De Quincey he went to London, and knew Oxford Street for a stony-hearted stepmother; his wealth, like De Quincey's once, lay in two volumes, for he carried Æschylus in one pocket, Blake in the other; and the parallel might, if to profit, be further outdrawn. To most incongruous modes of making a living he now put his hand. His assistantship in a shop near Leicester Square would have fitted him for the production of a record of _Adventures among Boots_; and later, as a "collector" for a bookseller he must often have bent beneath the sack, which, if heavy, so he might comfort himself, was at least heavy with books. Of these things he spoke with a matter-of-fact, all-accepting, simplicity when, a little later, some verses he sent to a magazine brought him believers, who sought until they found him. After a course of medical treatment, he went to Storrington. That beautiful Sussex village has now its fixed place on the map of English literature. For there it was that Francis Thompson discovered his possibilities as a poet. On its common he met the village child, whom he calls "Daisy," in the verses that are so named. And it was characteristic of this poet that from the ordinary episodes of ordinary days he made his "golden musics." When he saw the sunset at Storrington, the resulting Ode was dotted with local landmarks--the cross, for instance, casting its shadow in the monastery garden. The children of the family in London, into which he was received, were the subjects of _Poppy_, _The Making of Viola_, _To Monica Thought Dying_, _To my Godchild_--all in the first book of _Poems_; while two of their number have a noble heritage in _Sister Songs_. Constant to the end, when he died some newly pencilled lines were found, addressed "To Olivia," a yet younger sister, recalling the strains of fifteen years before: I fear to love you, Sweet, because Love's the ambassador of loss. To their mother likewise were addressed the poems of Fair Love, labelled _Love in Dian's Lap_, of which Coventry Patmore said that "Laura might have been proud"; hers also were many of the _New Poems_.