He again employs couplets in one of the most appealing of all this series, “In Exile,” which is the prayer of an archer of the new world that England, the mother of archers, will call him home. Later Mr. Thompson essayed a number of poems in a flexible ode form, showing a broadening of his powers and a widening of his personal horizons. The flight in such pieces as “In Captivity” and “Before Sunrise” is longer than in the earlier poems. It is a pleasure to find a poet to whom America is so satisfactory as a field that he dares to set up the mocking-bird against the nightingale. Mr. Thompson makes the home-songster a medium for communicating the spirit and significance of our democracy to our friends overseas. The movement through all these poems is free and vigorous, and the irregular lines please by the happy chance of the rhymes. The pleasant winds of which the poet writes so refreshingly creep often into his measures. Patriotic subjects he touches with nobility and fervor; and he became the laureate of reconstruction when he penned his ringing poem “To the South,” the conclusion of which must not be omitted here:-- “I am a Southerner; I love the South; I dared for her To fight from Lookout to the Sea, With her proud banner over me. But from my lips thanksgiving broke As God in battle thunder spoke, And that Black Idol, breeding drouth And dearth of human sympathy Throughout the sweet and sensuous South, Was, with its chains and human yoke, Blown hellward from the cannon’s mouth, While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!” Again, when invited to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa, of Harvard, in 1893, he chose for his subject “Lincoln’s Grave,” expressing, with greater care, similar feelings of loyalty, and recounting Lincoln’s high qualities with eloquent appreciation.