SOUND CRITICISM; BUT ONE cannot help but feeling that, in the critic’s mind, the excesses of Thompson’s poetry held too much place. Lionel Johnson was jealous for the language, having the scholar’s and poet’s mind, dwelling himself in a lofty serenity. “A Corymbus to Autumn,” that crowning of her with vine-leaves, is one of the excesses that may claim too prominent a place when we come to estimate Francis Thompson. Its excesses are very bad. Who can forget?—

The sopped sun, toper as ever drank hard
+++Stares foolish, hazed,
+++Rubicund, dazed,
Totty with thine October tankard.

Or,

+++Thy mists enclip
Her steel-circuit illuminous
+++Until it crust
+++Rubiginous
With the glorious gules of a glowing rust.

Yet even with this poem, in which ecstasy reels, has noble passages:—

+++See, how there
+++The cowlèd night
Kneels on the Eastern sanctuary stair.
What is this feel of incense everywhere?
+++Clings it round folds of the blanch-amiced clouds.
Upwafted by the solemn thurifer,
+++The mighty spirit unknown
That swingeth the slow earth before the embannered Throne?
+++Or is’t the Season under all these shrouds
Of light and sense and silence makes her known
+++A presence everywhere,
+++An inarticulate prayer,
A hand on the soothed tresses of the air?
+++But there is one hour scant
Of this Titanian primal liturgy:
As there is but one hour for thee and me,
+++Autumn for thee and thine hierophant
+++Of this grave ending chant.
+++Round the earth, still and stark
Heaven’s death-lights kindle, yellow, spark by spark,
Beneath the dreadful catafalque of the dark.

After the excesses, the dabbled spilt wine and blood and fire of the opening passages, how coolly this comes, like moonlight and starlight and the dark!

He played ducks and drakes with the English language, as Lionel Johnson said, in these corybantic ecstasies of his, “more than the worst American newspaper”; for how should an American newspaper harm that with which it has not even a nodding acquaintance? But for it he made noble amends. Let us turn to some of those high and sweet passages of poetry in which the Muse walks in white with sane and holy eyes. We find an entire nobility in the series of poems, “Love in Dian’s Lap,” with Coventry Patmore used to say Petrarch’s Laura might be proud of receiving. Indeed, no woman was ever praised more nobly in a poem that praises all women. Like all the poet’s work, it is overladen with thought and imagery. But there are wonderful, clear passages:—

Thy childhood must have felt the stings
Of too divine o’ershadowings:
Its odorous heart have been a blossom
That in darkness did unbosom,
Those fire-flies of God to invite,
Burning spirits which, by right,
Bear upon their laden wing
To such hearts impregnating.
++*++*++*++*
I think thy girlhood’s watchers must
Have took thy folded songs on trust,
And felt them as one feels the stir
Of still lightnings in the hair,
When conscious hush expects the cloud
To speak the golden secret loud
Which tacit air is privy to:
Flasked in the grape the wine they knew,
Ere thy poet-mouth was able
For its first young starry babble.
Keep’st thou not yet that subtle grace?
Yea, in this silent interspace
God sets His poems in thy face.

And again:—

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul;
As birds see not the casement for the sky?
And as ‘tis check they prove its presence by,
I know not of her body till I find
My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.
Hers is the face whence all should copied be
Did God make replicas of such as she;
Its presence felt by what it does abate:
Because the soul shines through, tempered and mitigate:
Where—as a figure labouring at night
Beside the body of a splendid light—
Dark Time works hidden by its luminousness;
And every line he labours to impress
Turns added beauty like the veins that run
Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun.