tude: and to these "dear givers" was dedicated the first volume of his poems. Some of these had been written in Sussex, at the Premonstratensian Monastery of Storrington, to which the new-found friends had directed him. And here, during the following months, was passed an interval of ardently serene creativeness. Here and in London "The Hound of Heaven" took final form—that tremendous and triumphant ode which silenced the most adverse batteries of criticism, and which to the last must stand as one of Thompson's very greatest achievements. Here flamed into life "The Setting Sun." Most of his poems upon children were subsequently composed, and "Love in Dian's Lap" took on its chastely perfect vesture, in London. There too were written the Sister Songs, published as a second volume in 1895; and Pantasaph, near Holywell, in Wales, itself the seat of a Capuchin Monastery, was the birthplace of most of the New Poems which appeared in 1897. Accentuation, all along, might be declared the keynote of this last volume, for every characteristic of the earlier work we here find deepened. It is at once more searchingly philosophical and more richly imaginative; its tenderness is more impassioned, its pathos more intense; while a certain marvellous verbal jugglery (that purple cloud of chaotic magnificence which so often wrapped, and sometimes obscured, Francis Thompson's thought) is even more inalienably dominant in them.
Then the poet returned to London; there he lived, for the greater number of his remaining years, in intimate union with one family of friends, but latterly he wrote little poetry. A few trenchant prose reviews came from his hand during the final decade. Then also was written that admirable and unique Life of St. Ignatius. But not the wisest and the dearest of our poet's
