impossible the chosen vocation must be. So the breach came, the needless yet inevitable breach; only healed by sufferance under the Franciscan shadow of Pantasaph, a few months before the parent's death. "I was in every sense an unsatisfactory son," the poet declared with sad humility in his later life.
Up to London came the young exile, unfriended, with a body never robust, a heart of aching sensitiveness, and a mind absorbed in dreams of ideal beauty. Nothing was ever so inconsolably easy as his steep, his swift descent. Those days upon the cruel London streets; those nights when he lay outcast, suffering the "abashless inquisition of each star"; the wonderful, tentative efforts; the ceaseless literary discouragements; the want, the shame, the impotence of it all, bore their speedy fruit. Master of the drug this poet early scorned to be: but now, in his misery, the servitude to the drug was his. There, at least, lay the cessation of pain. It sounds almost melodramatic, the sequel to this terrible prologue: yet it comes to us upon Thompson's own word that only the hand of Thomas Chatterton—reaching out to him from the twilight world of poetry and of death—stayed his own hand in what might have been the hour of despair. That was the night of ultimate darkness. But the angels kept watch and slept not until morning broke. And with morning came the dawn of a new life for Francis Thompson.
The honour of "discovering" the poet rests primarily with the editor of Merry England through whose insight the worth of his vagrant scraps of manuscript was recognized, through whose tender, indefatigable patience he was tracked and coerced into salvation. To him—as, in a double sense, to his wife, Alice Meynell—fell due the debt of Thompson's immortal grati-
