And when, immortal mortal, droops your head, And you, the child of deathless song, are dead; Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance The ranks of Paradise for my countenance, Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod, Among the bearded counsellors of God; For if in Eden as on earth are we I sure shall keep a younger company: Pass where beneath their ranged ganfalons The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns, The dreadful mass of their enridged spears; Pass where majestical the Eternal peers The stately choice of the great saintdom meet,-- A silvern congregation, globed complete In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet: Pass by where wait, your poet wayfarer, Your cousin clusters, emulous to share With you the roseal lightnings burning mid their hair; Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads Seven:-- Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven. I have said that Francis Thompson was great and simple enough to do the obvious thing. Take the mere matter of how to act and what to say in regard to a crucifix, for example. When that admirable poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was before a crucifix, or had it in mind as the theme of a poem, he would admire the carving, and write a colorful romantic ballad about the man who made it, the man who sold it, the people through whose hands it had passed. The result would be a beautiful poem, but it would be elaborate, artificial, the result of ingenious effort. When Swinburne was before a crucifix, he was reminded of the false delights for which he longed, and which he thought Christianity had driven from the world. So he would rave and blaspheme against the crucifix and all that it represented--producing verse that is technically excellent, but artificial and unnatural. But when Francis Thompson had a crucifix before him or in mind, he would do the simplest and most natural thing in the world. He would say his prayers. And because he was a genius he said them in words that are, as we use the term of literature, immortal. A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY Of Elizabeth-Jane who is the heroine of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," if heroine this tale may be said to have, we learn that "she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." This is a rather Jacobean sentence, in form not typical of Hardy, but in thought it is greatly significant. It is likely that Hardy himself wondered at the happiness in which he left Elizabeth-Jane, reassuring himself perhaps by the conviction that her "unbroken tranquillity" was the exception which proved the rule her youth had taught her.