Francis Thompson. Death mask by Everard Meynell. National Portrait Gallery.

THOSE WERE NOT WRONG in an age especially of the little poet who hailed Francis Thompson as a great poet—the last of the Elizabethans, in the royal line of succession to the kings of English poetry. We have kept of his work three slender volumes, so rich in poetry that they might have made many, and a new poem in the Selected Poems: he never beat his thought out thin. What he rejected might have made other poets rich. Rejected! The word makes one remember. Heaven knows how much great poetry he destroyed in his fits of depression and despair. To those who rescued Francis Thompson from the depths and with him his cargo of golden verse the world owes much. A service it is unaware of, and has not acknowledged, was the saving of so many of these poems, which, torn to tatters and flung in a waste-paper basket or on the floor, were saved and pieced together. Francis Thompson repaid those friends royally for what they did for him; and that was something few of us would have undertaken or would have carried out with such loving patience. There was something lovable about him, about his simplicity, his humanity, his humbleness, which perhaps made the burden of his faithful friends lighter, as it made their grief heavier when he died.

The body had carried the soul by dark and miserable ways often; but the soul was brother to the stars, and kept its light undimmed. One thinks of his epitaph as he wrote it of another:

Starry Amorist, starward gone,
—Thou art,—what thou didst gaze upon.

Published in DXLXII O.S, 1910. Minor edits. Manually transcribed exclusively for the New Series. To obtain the unedited text or for complete bibliographical information, please see the copyright page for instructions. Please note The Fortnightly Review [New Series] and fortnightlyreview.co.uk in citations based on this transcription.