aching melancholy, that scourge of every sensitive mind. Yet his was, ultimately, a cheerfulness such as merely cheerful men may never know. "Giotto lived in a gloomier town than Euripides," declares Mr. Chesterton (he who knows so well how to say serious things frivolously), "but in a gayer universe." And our poet walked with Giotto. For he believed supremely in God: and he believed in stepping-stones up which the soul might hope to climb; down which God himself might, peradventure, descend. In Francis Thompson, more, seemingly, than in any poet of the present time, has the ascetic ideal found a champion and an exponent.
Lose, that the lost thou may'st receive;
Die, for none other way canst live,
he bids us, in words which might echo those once spoken beside the Sea of Galilee. The world has never been willing to accept them without a struggle. Indeed, may it not be that only through struggle and conflict and defeat is their truth made manifest?
No really morbid heart has ever been able to delight in children: but Thompson loved them frankly and faithfully. Few poets have written more feelingly of (one does not say for) these little ones. This is patent in all three volumes of his verse—while of the second it is, of course, the very raison d'être. A passage of imperishable beauty in the Sister Songs hints how one scarcely more than a child,
a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city streets blown withering,
had lent her ministering touch to the poet's heart in those dark, earlier days. And all the world
