Designer infinite!
Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
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Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
Be dunged with rotten death?
Words of terrible import these—and of a truth before which one veils the unwilling eyes: the words of a poet whose heart had already endured the charring of God's insatiate flame; who, in death, was yet to look down upon the whitening harvest of his art.
For the world knew not Francis Thompson during the days of his pilgrimage. Only a little band—the poets, the elect, and sundry of those whose eyes had by miracle been opened—knew him. They, after all, were the only ones whose praise could have signified to the man himself. But after he had gone out from among us the world wakened up. The world had, indeed, almost immediately the grace to realise how costly a loss had befallen it. The world mourned the poet. The world began to read his thrice-precious legacy. And so the world grew rich. Then came that memorable, that almost spectacular, posthumous essay on Shelley, as rich and as radiant as a handful of jewels; and even the general reader capitulated. So that to-day one may quite declare Thompson's immortality to have been speedily achieved; for only the dead are immortal.
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