election none too sure; neither does any know the depths of Hell like him who has gazed down from Heaven's view-point. So with this cry of spiritual isolation is mingled the pleading voice of human impotence:
Some hold, some stay
O difficult Joy, I pray,
Some arms of thine,
Not only, only arms of mine!
Lest like a weary girl I fall
From clasping love so high,
And lacking thus thine arms, then may
Most hapless I
Turn utterly to love of basest rate;
For low they fall whose fall is from the sky.
This Titanic struggle of soul and sense, of will and work, this struggle which is man—
Bread predilectedly
O' the worm and Deity!—
this battle which is the clearest witness of life—save only for those few who have attained to the "unitive" life of resurgent victory and peace—is mightily mirrored in the pages of Francis Thompson. "Any Saint," "To the Dead Cardinal of Westminster," "A Judgment in Heaven"—in these the pillars of our habitual and superficial security, "les convenances," fall crashing about our heads. We have no choice but to gaze at the poet's own "heart-perturbing" visions. That little matter of man and his eternal destiny (matter of all the preachers in all the ages), it is this the white-faced poet is considering. He walks through the valley of the great Shadow; and what wonder that his brows are bound with thorn as well as cypress? It was nowise possible that Thompson should have escaped melancholy—intense and
