refrain, provide a very rhythmic vehicle. There was a rose-tree blooming once upon Nazareth Hill, he tells us—with the playful seriousness of some old ballad—but it passed from men's eyes into the secret place of God: and cannot the heart guess the name of this sweet mystery?
Is Mary that rose then? Mary the tree?
But the Blossom, the Blossom there, who can it be?
Who can her rose be? It could be but One;
Christ Jesus, our Lord—her God and her Son.
In the Gardens of God, in the daylight divine,
Show me thy Son, Mother, Mother of mine.
What was the colour of that Blossom bright?
White to begin with, immaculate white.
But what a wild flush on the flakes of it stood,
When the Rose ran in crimsonings down the Cross-wood.
In the Gardens of God, in the daylight divine
I shall worship the Wounds with thee, Mother of mine.
Though Francis Thompson was, in life and in death, hailed as the successor of Crashaw, the mantle of that mystic dreamer fell even more truly upon the shoulders of Gerard Hopkins. His was the same wistful pathos and resolute detachment from life's more passional aspects. In both men there was a similar tragic sensitiveness—an inevitable recoil from the inconsistency and ugliness and corruption which are a part of human existence. So it seems natural enough, despite the intervening centuries, that even the objective facts of their lives should bear a curious resemblance; and that both poets should pass, painfully but unreluctantly, into the larger life, wearied and forespent ere half their years.
But we have yet to consider an ode of sustained beauty and ecstasy, his longest and perhaps most
