Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about something too large for anyone to understand, and now, again, because they are talking about something too small for anyone to see. FRANCIS THOMPSON possessed both these infinities.... He was describing the evening earth with its mist and fume and fragrance, and represented the whole as rolling upwards like a smoke; then suddenly he called the whole ball of the earth a thurible, and said that some gigantic spirit swung it slowly before God. This is the case of the image too large for comprehension; another instance sticks in my mind of the image which is too small. In one of his poems he says that the abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priest and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing--these ideas, and twenty more, are all tacitly concentrated in the word "Pontifical." In FRANCIS THOMPSON'S poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.--G. K. CHESTERTON, in _The Illustrated London News_. Thompson used his large vocabulary with a boldness--and especially a recklessness, almost a frivolity in rhyme--that were worthy of BROWNING. On the other hand, these rugged points were, at a further view, absorbed into the total effect of beauty in a manner which BROWNING never achieved; for the poet, entirely free from timidity in matters of poetic form, relied not on chastity or perfection of detail, but on the perfervid rush of his genius, which simply carried his readers over the rough places. Here was a large utterance--large in bulk, in speed, in a lavish disregard of economy, and yet, what could not for a moment be mistaken was that the poetry was at once great and sincere. These _Sister Songs_, written in praise of two little sisters, contain a number of lovely and most musical lines, and some passages--such as the seventh section of the first poem--which SPENSER would not have disowned.--_The Times._