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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Hound of Heaven
+
+Author: Francis Thompson
+
+Illustrator: Stella Langdale
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #30730]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUND OF HEAVEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Front end papers]
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece:
+
+  When she lit her glimmering tapers
+  Round the day's dead sanctities  _Page 52_]
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Title page]
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+_By_ FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+
+STELLA LANGDALE
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+
+1926
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922,
+
+BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The Rev. Mark J. McNeal, S. J., who was one of the successors of
+Lafcadio Hearn in the chair of English Literature at the Tokyo Imperial
+University, in an interesting article recounts the following incident
+of his experience in that institution.  "I was seated on the examining
+board with Professor Ichikawa, the dean of the English department...
+There entered the room a student whom I recognized as among the best in
+the class, a sharp young chap with big Mongolian eyes, and one who had
+never to my knowledge given any hint of even a leaning toward
+Christianity.  I remembered, however, that his thesis submitted for a
+degree had been a study of Francis Thompson.  Following the usual
+custom, I began to question him about his thesis.
+
+"'Why did you choose Thompson?'
+
+"'Well, he is quite a famous poet.'
+
+"'What kind of poet is he?'
+
+"'We might call him a mystic.'
+
+"'Is he a mystic of the orthodox sort, like Cynewulf or Crashaw; or an
+unorthodox mystic, like Blake or Shelley?'
+
+"'Oh, he's orthodox.'
+
+"'Well, now, what do you consider his greatest production?'
+
+"'Why, I should say "The Hound of Heaven."
+
+"'Well, what on earth does Thompson mean by that Hound?'
+
+"'He means God.'
+
+"'But is not that a rather irreverent way for Thompson to be talking
+about God, calling Him a hound?  What does he mean by comparing God to
+a hound?'
+
+"'Well, he means the pursuit of God.'
+
+"'Oh, I see, Thompson is pursuing God, is he?'
+
+"'Oh, no.  He is rather running away from God.'
+
+"'Well, then, God is pursuing Thompson, is that it?'
+
+"'Yes, that's it.'
+
+[Illustration: Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears  _Page 45_]
+
+'"But, see here; according to Thompson's belief God is everywhere,
+isn't He?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'Well, then, how can God be going after Thompson?  Is it a physical
+pursuit?'
+
+"'No.  It is a moral pursuit.'
+
+"'A moral pursuit!  What's that?  What is God after?'
+
+"'He is after Thompson's love.'
+
+"And then we, the Jesuit and the Buddhist, began to follow the windings
+and turnings of that wondrous poem, the most mystic and spiritual thing
+that has been written since St. Teresa laid down her pen.  What the
+other member of the examining board thought of it all I never heard.
+But I think I acquired a satisfactory answer to that question so often
+put to me: Can the Japanese really grasp a spiritual truth?  Do they
+really get at the meaning of Christianity?  This, of a race that has
+produced more martyrs than any other nation since the fall of Rome and
+that kept the Faith for two centuries without a visible symbol or
+document!"
+
+The incident supplies matter for other conclusions more germane to the
+subject of this essay.  The late Bert Leston Taylor, a journalist whose
+journalism had a literary facet of critical brilliance, once declared
+that he could not perceive the excellence of Francis Thompson's poetry.
+When someone suggested that it might be that he was not spiritual
+enough, the retort was laconic and crushing, "Or, perhaps, not
+ecclesiastical enough."  Like most good retorts Taylor's had more wit
+than truth.  He was obsessed by the notion, prevalent among a certain
+class of literary critics, that Francis Thompson's fame was the
+artificially stimulated applause of a Catholic coterie, whose
+enthusiasm could hardly be shared by readers with no particular
+curiosity about Catholic ideas or modes of religion.  It was probably
+this obsession which prompted that able critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, to
+write to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell when the "Hound of Heaven" first appeared:
+"I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable poet, but, if he
+is ever to become other than a 'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'--if
+indeed it is worth anyone's ambition to be other than that--it will
+only be by working in a different manner.  A 'public' to appreciate the
+'Hound of Heaven' is to me inconceivable."  Mr. William Archer, an
+experienced judge of popular likes, was of the same opinion.  "Yet,"
+Francis Thompson's biographer tells us, "in the three years after
+Thompson's death the separate edition of the 'Hound of Heaven' sold
+fifty thousand copies; and, apart from anthologies, many more thousands
+were sold of the books containing it."  When the "Hound of Heaven" is
+selected for study, and explained in words of one syllable, by a young
+Japanese student in the Tokyo Imperial University almost thirty years
+after the poem was published, one can hardly maintain that it calls for
+certain ecclesiastical affiliations before it can be understood and
+felt, or that its "public" is necessarily circumscribed.
+
+It must be owned indeed that Francis Thompson was a puzzle to his
+contemporaries of the nineties.  He paid the usual penalty of vaulting
+originality.  The decade is famous for its bold experiments and shining
+successes in the art of poetry.  One might expect that a public, grown
+accustomed to exquisitely wrought novelties and eager to extend them a
+welcome, would have been preordained to recognize and hail the genius
+of Thompson.  But it was not so.  The estheticism of the nineties, for
+all its sweet and fragile flowers, was rooted in the dark passions of
+the flesh.  Its language was the language of death and despair and
+annihilation and the Epicurean need of exhausting the hedonistic
+possibilities of life ere the final engulfing in darkness and silence.
+When the speech of Thompson, laden with religion and spirituality and
+Christian mystery, broke with golden turbulence upon the world of the
+nineties, the critics were abashed and knew not what to think of it.
+The effect was somewhat like that produced by Attwater, in Stevenson's
+"The Ebb-Tide," when he began suddenly to discourse on Divine Grace to
+the amazement of Herrick and his crew of scoundrels from the stolen
+_Farallone_.  "Oh," exclaimed the unspeakable Huish, when they had
+recovered breath, "Oh, look 'ere, turn down the lights at once, and the
+Band of 'Ope will oblige!  This ain't a spiritual séance."  It had
+something akin to the madness of poor Christopher Smart when he fell
+into the habit of dropping on his knees and praying in the crowded
+London streets.  There was incongruity, verging on the indecent, in
+this intrusion of religion into art, as if an archangel were to attend
+an afternoon tea in Mayfair or an absinthe session in a Bohemian cafe.
+It was, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "an unnecessary deviation from the
+usual modes of the world" which struck the world dumb.
+
+The poetry of Francis Thompson appeared in three small volumes:
+"Poems," published in 1893; "Sister Songs," in 1895; and "New Poems,"
+in 1897.  The first of these volumes contained the "Hound of Heaven";
+though it staggered reviewers at large, they yielded dubious and
+carefully measured praise and waited for developments.  The pack was
+unleashed and the hue-and-cry raised on the coming of "Sister Songs"
+and "New Poems."  Andrew Lang and Mr. Arthur Symons led the chorus of
+disapproval.  It is amusing to read now that Francis Thompson's "faults
+are fundamental.  Though he uses the treasure of the Temple, he is not
+a religious poet.  The note of a true spiritual passion never once
+sounds in his book."  Another critic of the poet declares that "nothing
+could be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression
+it leaves on the mind.  It is like a dictionary of obsolete English
+suffering from a severe fit of delirium tremens."  A prominent literary
+periodical saw, in the attempt to foist Thompson on the public as a
+genuine poet, a sectarian effort to undermine the literary press of
+England.  In the course of a year the sale of "Sister Songs" amounted
+to 349 copies.  The "New Poems" fared worse; its sale, never large,
+practically ceased a few years after its appearance, three copies being
+sold during the first six months of 1902.
+
+[Illustration: Across the margent of the world I fled  _Page 47_]
+
+And all this despite strong recommendations from fastidious quarters.
+George Meredith's recognition was instantaneous and unreserved.
+Henley's was accompanied by reproofs.  Mr. Richard LeGallienne was
+enthusiastic.  Mr. William Archer said to a friend, "This is not work
+which can possibly be _popular_ in the wide sense; but it is work that
+will be read and treasured centuries hence by those who really care for
+poetry."  And he wrote to Thompson, "I assure you no conceivable
+reaction can wipe out or overlay such work as yours.  It is firm-based
+on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say all the more confidently
+because it does not happen to appeal to my own speculative, or even my
+own literary, prejudices."  The most extravagant admirer of all, and
+the one who will probably turn out to have come nearer the mark than
+any of Francis Thompson's contemporaries, was Mr. J. L. Garvin, the
+well known English leader-writer in politics and literature.  "After
+the publication of his second volume," he wrote in the English
+_Bookman_, March 1897, "when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven'
+and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical
+sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the
+highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets.
+The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature.  The 'Hound of
+Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' are the second greatest; and there is no
+third.  In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic
+mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography....  Even with the
+greatest pages of 'Sister Songs' sounding in one's ears, one is
+sometimes tempted to think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's
+high-water mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import--if we do
+damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he
+thrusts the word upon us.  We do not think we forget any of the
+splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of
+Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we
+consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language.  It
+fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and
+dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the
+very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad music of humanity.  It
+is the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas à Kempis....  The
+regal air, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, Mr. Thompson
+has them all.  A rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
+has never been known to poetry.  To many this will seem the simple
+delirium of over-emphasis.  The writer signs for those others, nowise
+ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a
+living poet, Francis Thompson."
+
+We do not associate Mr. Arnold Bennett with any of the ideas in
+religion or literature which supplied impulse to Francis Thompson.  It
+is a surprise of the first magnitude to find him carried away into the
+rapture of prophecy by the "Sister Songs."  "I declare," he says in an
+article appearing in July, 1895, "that for three days after this book
+appeared I read nothing else.  I went about repeating snatches of
+it--snatches such as--
+
+  'The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
+  Moves all the labouring surges of the world.'
+
+My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer
+poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare.  Show me the
+divinest glories of Shelley and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the
+'Lotus Eaters' and the songs in the 'Princess,' and I think I can match
+them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at
+an ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary prosaic crown.  I fear
+that in thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly outraging
+the canons of criticism.  For the man is alive, he gets up of a morning
+like common mortals, not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and
+every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet must not be
+called great until he is dead or very old.  Well, please yourself what
+you think.  But, in time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."  A
+whole generation of men has passed away since these words appeared; but
+they do not seem to be so fantastic and whimsical now as they seemed to
+be then.
+
+[Illustration: I said to dawn: Be sudden  _Page 47_]
+
+It can scarcely be claimed that the prophecies of Meredith, Mr. Garvin,
+and Mr. Arnold Bennett were of the kind which ultimately assures the
+event.  The reading-world dipped curiously into the pages about which
+there was so much conflict of opinion; it was startled and bewildered
+by a novel and difficult form of verse; and finally it agreed with the
+majority of critics that it was mostly nonsense--too Catholic to be
+catholic.  The poems sold badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best.  It
+is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time.  Even Thompson's
+coreligionists were cold.  Indeed, it may be said they were the
+coldest.  If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected
+Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the
+Catholic public feared him for his art.  It was a wild unfettered thing
+which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be
+trusted to run in divine grooves.  One can afford to extenuate the
+attitude of reserve.  It was a period when brilliant heterodoxies and
+flaunting decadence were in the air.  The fact is, that critics and
+public delivered Thompson over to the Catholics; and the Catholics
+would have nothing to do with him.  Canon Sheehan could write of
+Thompson in 1898:
+
+"Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have noticed this surprising
+genius--Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell.  The vast bulk of our
+coreligionists have not even heard his name, although it is already
+bruited amongst the Immortals; and the great Catholic poet, for whose
+advent we have been straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes,
+sung his immortal songs, and vanished."  This was written almost ten
+years before Thompson died, but after his resolve to write no more
+poetry.
+
+It is easily within the probabilities that, small as was Thompson's
+audience during his lifetime, it would have been still smaller but for
+the extraneous interest excited by the strange story of his life.  He
+was born on December 16, 1859, in Preston, Lancashire, whence he went
+at the age of eleven to Ushaw College, a Catholic boarding school for
+boys.  This is the college where Lafcadio Hearn received his education;
+he had left the school a year or two before young Thompson's arrival.
+Both boys were designed for the priesthood.  Hearn lost his faith then
+or shortly afterwards: Thompson's irregular habits of dreamy
+abstraction rendered him unfit for a sacerdotal career.  When he had
+completed his course at college, where he had distinguished himself in
+English composition and attained respectable standing in the classics,
+his father, a hard-working physician, entered the lad, now eighteen, as
+a student of medicine in Owen College, Manchester.  The Thompson family
+had moved from Preston to Ashton-under-Lyne, where proximity to
+Manchester made it possible for the young medical student to spend his
+nights at home.
+
+Francis was of the silent and secretive sort where he could not hope to
+find intelligent sympathy.  This, and some cloudy compromise with his
+sense of filial dutifulness, will perhaps explain why he passed six
+years as a student of medicine without any serious purpose of becoming
+a physician and without informing his father of his disinclination.
+Three examinations and three failures at intervals of a year were
+necessary to convince the father of the true state of affairs.  Stern
+measures were adopted; and, although the consequences were pitifully
+tragical, it is hard to blame the father of Francis.  How are we to
+discover the extraordinary seal in a case that requires special and
+extraordinary treatment?
+
+Francis was twenty-four years old with no more idea than a child's of
+how life is planned on practical lines of prosperity.  The senior
+Thompson thought it time for him to learn and issued orders to find
+employment of some remunerative kind.  Accordingly during the next two
+years Francis served indifferently for brief periods as a clerk in the
+shop of a maker of surgical instruments and as a canvasser of an
+encyclopedia.  Both experiments in the art of making a living were
+failures, increasing paternal dissatisfaction.  The desperate young man
+then enlisted in the army, and after a few weeks' of drilling was
+rejected on the score of physical weakness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I knew how the clouds arise,
+  Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings  _Page 51_]
+
+During these shiftless and unhappy years as a listless medical student
+and laggard apprentice the poet's chief solace was the public library
+of Manchester.  In his daily absences from home his misery suggested
+another solace of a sinister kind.  After a severe illness during his
+second year of medicine his mother, says his biographer, presented him
+with a copy of De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater."  It is
+incredible that a _helluo librorum_, like Thompson, should have reached
+the age of twenty without ever having read a book which is one of the
+first to attract every bright school-boy.  This would be particularly
+true of a school-boy who lived near Manchester, De Quincey's own town.
+But the evidence seems to be against probabilities.  Thompson succumbed
+completely to the influence of the great genius whose temper and
+circumstances of life were singularly like his own.  Experiments in
+laudanum were made and habits contracted which accentuated a natural
+unfitness to wrestle with the practical problems of getting on and
+rendered family intercourse drearier than ever.
+
+In 1885, when he was twenty-six years old, Francis decided to leave
+home.  After a week in Manchester he requested and received from his
+father the price of a railway ticket for London.  The trip to the vast
+and strange city must have been made with only the vaguest of plans for
+the future.  The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than
+to rid his father of his vexatious presence.  There were friends in
+London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly
+allowance from home.  But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man
+away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after
+a while came to be unclaimed.  The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge
+city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of
+their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him.  In a period
+extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a
+vagrant in the streets and alleys.  He made one or two brave essays at
+regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success.
+The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged
+and gaunt roustabout contained no useful hints for the difficulties of
+the peculiar situation; its harshness could be transmuted into
+temporary and blessed oblivion by a drug whenever the means for
+purchase could be acquired.  The Guildhall Library was much frequented
+until shabbiness was excluded by the policeman.  This outcast poet,
+approaching thirty years of age, was at various times a bootblack, a
+newsboy, a vendor of matches, a nocturnal denizen of wharves and
+lounger on the benches of city-parks.  His cough-racked frame was the
+exposed target of cold and rain and winds.  He became used to hunger.
+At one time a six-pence, for holding a horse, was his only earnings for
+a week.  It was while he was aimlessly roaming the streets one night
+almost delirious from starvation that a prosperous shoe-merchant,
+benevolently engaged in religious rescue-work, came across Thompson,
+and, struck by the incongruity of his gentle speech, induced him to
+accept employment in his shop.  But one cannot allow business to suffer
+on account of an inveterate blunderer, even though the blunderer wear
+wings and has endeared himself to the family.  Mr. McMaster, kindly
+Anglican lay-missionary, who deserves grateful remembrance for
+recognizing and temporarily helping merit under the most deceptive
+disguise, was obliged much against his inclination to dismiss Francis
+and to allow him to fall back into the pit of squalor and vagabondage.
+
+But the few months of reprieve had supplied Thompson with the impulse
+to write.  Shortly after he was dropped from the McMaster establishment
+Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, the editor of _Merry England_, a Catholic
+magazine, received the following letter: "_Feb. 23rd, '87_--Dear
+Sir,--In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must
+ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript.  It is due, not to
+slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which
+it has been written.  For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse
+experience has something fouled.  I enclose stamped envelope for a
+reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding
+your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final.  I can hardly expect
+that where my prose fails my verse will succeed.  Nevertheless, on the
+principle of 'Yet will I try the last,' I have added a few specimens of
+it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
+Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I
+remain yours with little hope,
+
+"Francis Thompson.
+
+"Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office."
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+  ..... smitten me to my knee;
+  I am defenceless utterly   _Page 55_]
+
+
+The unpromising aspect of the manuscript, thus introduced, was the
+occasion of editorial neglect for some months.  When at last Mr.
+Meynell gave it his attention he was electrified into action.  He wrote
+to the address given by Thompson.  The letter was returned from the
+dead-letter office after many days.  Then he published one of the poems
+mentioned in the letter, "The Passion of Mary," in the hope that the
+author would disclose his whereabouts.  The plan succeeded and brought
+a letter from Thompson with a new address.  Mr. Meynell tried to waylay
+him at the new address, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane, but with
+characteristic shiftlessness the poet forgot to call there for possible
+letters.  But the seller of drugs finally established communications
+between the editor and the poet, and one day, more than a year after
+Thompson's first literary venture had been sent, he visited the office
+of _Merry England_.  Mr. Everard Meynell, the poet's biographer, thus
+describes the entrance of the poet into his father's sanctum.  "My
+father was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him.  'Show him up,' he
+said, and was left alone.  Then the door opened, and a strange hand was
+thrust in.  The door closed, but Thompson had not entered.  Again it
+opened, again it shut.  At the third attempt a waif of a man came in.
+No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the
+average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken
+shoes, he found my father at a loss for words.  'You must have had
+access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said.
+'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that
+afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented
+mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails.  I had no books
+by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be
+done for him at that interview save the extraction of a promise to call
+again.  He made none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking
+sympathy and alms.  He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans
+for his benefit, and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would
+enable him to sleep in a bed and sit at a table."
+
+By patience and delicately offered kindnesses Mr. and Mrs. Meynell at
+length won the difficult privilege of helping the shy, nervous,
+high-strung spirit wandering in pain, hunger and exile amid the
+indecencies of extreme penury in a great city.  They were helped by the
+friendly sympathy and care of Premonstratensian and Franciscan monks.
+Thompson had sounded, and become familiar with, the depths of social
+degradation in all its external aspects of sordidness.  The most
+extraordinary part of his singular experience is that he affords a
+striking instance of the triumph of soul and mind over beleaguering
+circumstance.  The nightmare of his environment failed to subdue him.
+He preserved his spiritual sensitiveness, and literary ideals of a most
+exalted kind, through the most depressing and demoralizing experiences.
+The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell,
+entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan
+ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could
+walk unstained among the world's impurities.  "Bring back then, I say,
+in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on
+the cheek.  But you _cannot_ bring back the best age of Paganism, the
+age when Paganism was a faith.  None will again behold Apollo in the
+forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the
+long lustre of her golden locks.  But you _may_ bring back--_dii
+avertant omen_--the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and Statius, and
+Juvenal; of much philosophy, and little belief; of superb villas and
+superb taste; of banquets for the palate in the shape of cookery, and
+banquets for the eye in the shape of art; of poetry singing dead songs
+on dead themes with the most polished and artistic vocalisation; of
+everything most polished, from the manners to the marble floors; of
+vice carefully drained out of sight, and large fountains of virtue
+springing in the open air;--in one word, a most shining Paganism
+indeed--as putrescence also shines."  Unlike George Gissing and so many
+others who had to wade to celebrity through sloughs of bitter
+destitution, Francis Thompson felt no inclination to capitalize his
+expert knowledge of back streets and alleys for profit and the morbid
+entertainment of the curious.  His single failing in yielding to the
+attraction of an insidious drug seemed to be impotent to affect his
+high admirations and his clear perceptions in the regions of honor and
+religion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Yea, faileth now even dream
+  The dreamer  _Page 55_]
+
+It is surely one of the literary glories of a distinguished family that
+Mr. and Mrs. Meynell succeeded in helping Thompson to emancipate
+himself from the enslavement of a tyrannic habit.  His poetic genius
+began to flower in the new liberty.  For the next ten years interest in
+his poetry and literary friends and connections, few and select, made
+his life comparatively happy.  But he maintained a large measure of
+independence to the last.  That he was never ungrateful to those who
+befriended him, his poems are ample proof.  But in London he always had
+his own lodgings in a cheap but respectable quarter of the city.  His
+unpunctual and preoccupied manner sometimes created small distresses
+for his devoted friends to relieve.  During the last ten years of his
+life he wrote little poetry.  His vitality, never vigorous, was ebbing
+and unequal to the demands of inspired verse.  But during these years
+of decline he wrote much golden prose.  He was a regular and highly
+valued contributor to the _Academy_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Nation_, and
+the _Daily Chronicle_.  One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere
+industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work.  The published
+volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and
+allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage
+of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope
+to scale.  In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on
+Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose
+seems to be carried off its feet, as it were, in a very storm of poetic
+impulse.  The published essays are not a tithe of Thompson's writings
+for the press.  Moreover, we have a study of Blessed John de la Salle,
+a little volume on "Health and Holiness," and a large "Life of St.
+Ignatius Loyola," none of them suggesting even remotely the plantigrade
+writing of the mechanical hack.
+
+During the last year of his life, when consumption had almost
+completely undermined resistance, his old habit reasserted its empire.
+But it was not for long, and can hardly be said to have hastened the
+end, which came on November 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and
+St. Elizabeth.  He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, and
+on his coffin were roses from George Meredith's garden, with the
+poet-novelist's message: "A true poet, one of the small band."
+
+The "Hound of Heaven" has been called the greatest ode in the English
+language.  Such was the contemporary verdict of some of the most
+respected critics of the time, and the conviction of its justness
+deepens with the passing of years.  Recall the writers of great odes,
+Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Collins, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley,
+Coleridge,--the best they have done will not outstare the "Hound of
+Heaven."  Where shall we find its equal for exaltation of mood that
+knows no fatigue from the first word to the last?  The motion of
+angelic hosts must be like the movement of this ode, combining in some
+marvellous and mysterious way the swiftness of lightning with the
+stately progress of a pageant white with the blinding white light of an
+awful Presence.  The note of modernness is the quality which is most
+likely to mislead us in forecasting favorably the durability of
+contemporary poetry, appealing as it does to so many personal issues
+irrelevant to the standards of immortal art.  This is precisely the
+note which is least conspicuous in the "Hound of Heaven."  The poem
+might have been written in the days of Shakespeare, or, in a different
+speech, by Dante or Calderon.  The Rev. Francis P. LeBuffe, S. J., has
+written an interesting book on the "Hound of Heaven," pointing out the
+analogy between the poem and the psalms of David; and another Jesuit,
+the late Rev. J. F. X. O'Connor, in a published "Study" of the poem,
+says that in it Francis Thompson "seems to sing, in verse, the thought
+of St. Ignatius in the spiritual exercises,--the thought of St. Paul in
+the tender, insistent love of Christ for the soul, and the yearning of
+Christ for that soul which ever runs after creatures, till the love of
+Christ wakens in it a love of its God, which dims and deadens all love
+of creatures except through love for Him.  This was the love of St.
+Paul, of St. Ignatius, of St. Stanislaus, of St. Francis of Assist, of
+St. Clare, of St. Teresa."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  The hid battlements of Eternity:
+  Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
+  Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again  _Page 56_]
+
+The neologisms and archaic words employed in the poem seem to be a
+legitimate and instinctive effort of the poet's inspiration to soar
+above the limitations of time and to liberate itself from the transient
+accretions of a living, and therefore constantly changing, mode of
+speech.  He strove after an enfranchisement of utterance, devoid of
+stratifying peculiarities, assignable to no age or epoch, and
+understood of all.  A soul-shaking thought, prevalent throughout
+Christendom, was felt imaginatively by a highly endowed poet, and, like
+impetuous volcanic fires that fling heavenward mighty fragments and
+boulders of mountain in their red release, found magnificent expression
+in elemental grandeurs of language, shot through with the wild lights
+of hidden flames and transcending all pettiness of calculated artifice
+and fugitive fashion.
+
+The dominating idea in the "Hound of Heaven" is so familiar, so--one
+might say--innate, that it is almost impudent to undertake to explain
+it.  Even in the cases of persons to whom the reading of poetry is an
+uncultivated and difficult art, there is an instantaneous leap of
+recognition as the thought emerges from the cloudy glories of the poem.
+Still, modern popular systems of philosophy are so dehumanizing in
+their tendencies, and so productive of what may be called secondary and
+artificially planted instincts, that it is perhaps not entirely useless
+to attempt to elucidate the obvious.
+
+"The heavens," says Hazlitt, "have gone farther off and become
+astronomical."  The home-like conception of the universe in mediaeval
+times, when dying was like going out of one room into another, and man
+entertained a neighborly feeling for the angels, has a tendency to
+disappear as science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and
+space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life.  The curious notion
+has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every
+new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation.  God would
+seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty,
+stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing
+weight of the evidences of His Infinity.  We have modern thinkers
+regarding Christian notions of the Godhead as impossible to a mind
+acquainted with the paralyzing revelations of scientific knowledge.
+The late John Fiske used to deride what he called the anthromorphism of
+the Christian idea of God, as of a venerable, white-bearded man.  And
+these philosophers deem it more reverent to deny any personal
+relationship between God and man for the reason that God is too great
+to be interested in man, and man too little to be an object of interest.
+
+Before indicating the essential error of this attitude, it is necessary
+to state, merely for the sake of historical accuracy, that the
+Christian conception of the Godhead, as expressed by St. Thomas
+Aquinas, Dante, Lessius, and a host of Christian writers, has never
+been approached in its sublime suggestions of Infinite and Eternal
+power and glory by any modern philosopher.  In the second and third
+Lectures of Cardinal Newman's, "Scope and Nature of University
+Education," there is an outline of the Christian teaching of the nature
+of God which, in painstaking accuracy of thought and sheer grandeur of
+conception, has no counterpart in modern literature.
+
+Let us always remember that telescope and microscope in all the range
+of their discoveries have not uncovered the existence of anything
+greater than man himself.  The most massive star of the Milky Way is
+not so wonderful as the smallest human child.  Moreover man's present
+entourage of illimitable space and countless circling suns and planets
+cannot be said to have cost an omnipotent God more trouble, so to
+speak, than a universe a million times smaller.  The prodigality of the
+Creator reveals His endless resources; if the vision of sidereal
+abysses and flaming globes intimidates me and makes me cynical about my
+unimportance, is it not because I have lost the high consciousness of a
+spiritual being and forgotten the unplumbed chasms which separate
+matter from mind?
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+  Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
+  Be dunged with rotten death?  _Page 57_]
+
+In Francis Thompson's Catholic philosophy, which must be partially
+understood if the reader is to get at the heart of the "Hound of
+Heaven," the tremendous manifestations of God's attributes of power
+prepare us to expect equally tremendous manifestations of His
+attributes of love.  The more prodigal God is discovered to be in
+lavish expenditures of omnipotence in the material universe, the more
+alert the soul becomes to look for and to detect overwhelming surprises
+of Divine Love.  Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the
+special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the
+cross, and His sacramental life in the Church.  The Divine energy of
+God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself,
+seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of
+creation displayed in the revelation of nature.  Every new revelation
+of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore
+a balance in our mind between God's power and God's love.  The more
+astronomical the heavens become, the closer they bring God to us.
+
+Another conception of God to be kept in mind, if we are to grasp the
+meaning of the "Hound of Heaven," is the omniscient character, the
+infinite perfection, of God's knowledge.  God sees each of us as fully
+and completely as if there were no one else and nothing else to see
+except us.  Practically speaking, God gives each one of us His
+undivided attention.  And through this spacious channel of His Divine
+and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love.  The weak
+soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love.  It tries to
+elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which
+it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.
+
+Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left
+us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of
+its true bliss.  The following passage is an excellent commentary on
+the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to
+love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor
+little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its
+whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all
+it has to yield.  It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the
+upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the
+constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it.  It falls
+back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own
+plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital,
+where no upward effort is needful.  And it ends by giving for the
+meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
+self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God.  Even (how
+rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and
+unsatiated it leaves the soul.  One always is less generous to love
+than the other."
+
+God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it
+to a happiness which affrights it.  And the timid and self-seeking soul
+strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven,
+under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and
+study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature,
+if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle
+accents of pursuivant Love.  But all things are in league with God, Who
+made and rules them.  They cannot conspire against Him.  They betray
+the refugee.  He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find
+the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly.  The Divine
+thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of
+Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature.
+Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love.  The
+"Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul
+into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.
+
+JAMES J. DALY, S. J.
+
+
+
+
+OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"
+
+Francis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of
+his mature life in London where he died in 1907.  He was educated at
+Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College,
+Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.
+
+But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the
+consulting-room.  He walked to London in search of a living, finding,
+indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at
+length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others,
+and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which
+endured for a half-decade of years--his "Poems," his "Sister Songs,"
+and his "New Poems."
+
+"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to
+Thomas à Kempis."  The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in
+its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic
+Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his
+"Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite
+another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.
+
+W. M.
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+When she lit her glimmering tapers . . . . . . . . .   _Frontispiece_
+
+Titanic glooms of chasmed fears
+
+Across the margent of the world I fled
+
+I said to dawn: Be sudden
+
+I knew how the clouds arise
+
+Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+
+Yea, faileth now even dream
+
+The hid battlements of Eternity
+
+Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+
+I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+
+Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside
+
+Thunder-driven, They clanged His chariot
+
+In her wind-walled palace
+
+I shook the pillaring hours
+
+And now my heart is as a broken fount
+
+That Voice is round me like a bursting sea
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+  Of my own mind]
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
+  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
+  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+    Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
+  I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
+        Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
+        And shot, precipitated,
+  Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
+    From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
+        But with unhurrying chase,
+        And unperturbèd pace,
+      Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+        They beat--and a Voice beat
+        More instant than the Feet--
+      "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+        I pleaded, out law-wise,
+  By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
+    Trellised with intertwining charities
+  (For, though I knew His love Who followèd,
+        Yet was I sore adread
+  Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside);
+  But, if one little casement parted wide,
+    The gust of His approach would clash it to.
+    Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
+  Across the margent of the world I fled,
+    And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
+    Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars;
+        Fretted to dulcet jars
+  And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
+  I said to dawn: Be sudden; to eve: Be soon--
+    With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over
+        From this tremendous Lover!
+  Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
+    I tempted all His servitors, but to find
+  My own betrayal in their constancy,
+  In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
+    Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
+  To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
+    Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
+        But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
+      The long savannahs of the blue;
+          Or whether, Thunder-driven,
+      They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven
+  Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:--
+    Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
+          Still with unhurrying chase,
+          And unperturbèd pace,
+  Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+          Came on the following Feet,
+          And a Voice above their beat--
+  "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Thunder-driven,
+  They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven
+  Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet]
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+  I sought no more that after which I strayed
+      In face of man or maid;
+      But still within the little children's eyes
+    Seems something, something that replies,
+  _They_ at least are for me, surely for me!
+  I turned me to them very wistfully;
+  But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
+      With dawning answers there,
+  Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
+
+
+[Illustration: In her wind-walled palace]
+
+
+  Come then, ye other children,
+    Nature's--share
+    With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship;
+    Let me greet you lip to lip,
+    Let me twine with you caresses,
+        Wantoning
+    With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
+        Banqueting
+    With her in her wind-walled palace,
+    Underneath her azured daïs,
+    Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
+        From a chalice
+  Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
+        So it was done;
+  _I_ in their delicate fellowship was one--
+  Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
+        _I_ knew all the swift importings
+        On the wilful face of skies;
+        I knew how the clouds arise,
+        Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;
+          All that's born or dies
+      Rose and drooped with; made them shapers
+  Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine--
+        With them joyed and was bereaven.
+        I was heavy with the even,
+    When she lit her glimmering tapers
+      Round the day's dead sanctities.
+      I laughed in the morning's eyes.
+  I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
+      Heaven and I wept together,
+  And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
+  Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
+          I laid my own to beat,
+          And share commingling heat;
+  But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
+  In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
+  For ah! we know not what each other says,
+        These things and I; in sound _I_ speak--
+  _Their_ sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
+  Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake by drouth;
+        Let her, if she would owe me,
+  Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
+        The breasts o' her tenderness:
+  Never did any milk of hers once bless
+          My thirsting mouth.
+        Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
+          With unperturbèd pace,
+        Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+          And past those noisèd Feet
+          A Voice comes yet more fleet--
+        "Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I shook the pillaring hours
+  And pulled my life upon me]
+
+
+  Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+  My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
+          And smitten me to my knee;
+          I am defenceless utterly.
+          I slept, methinks, and woke,
+  And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
+  In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
+          I shook the pillaring hours
+  And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
+  I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years--
+  My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
+  My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
+  Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
+      Yea, faileth now even dream
+  The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
+  Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
+  I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
+  Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
+  For earth, with heavy griefs so overplussed.
+        Ah! is Thy love indeed
+  A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
+  Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
+          Ah! must--
+          Designer infinite!--
+  Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
+  My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+          From the dank thoughts that shiver
+  Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
+          Such is; what is to be?
+  The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
+  I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
+  Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
+  From the hid battlements of Eternity:
+  Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
+  Round the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again;
+          But not ere Him who summoneth
+          I first have seen, enwound
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+  From the dank thoughts that shiver
+  With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
+  His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
+  Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+          Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
+          Be dunged with rotten death?
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+  From the dank thoughts that shiver]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+  Now of that long pursuit
+  Comes on at hand the bruit;
+  That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
+          "And is thy earth so marred,
+          Shattered in shard on shard?
+    Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
+        Strange, piteous, futile thing,
+  Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
+  Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),
+  "And human love needs human meriting:
+        How hast thou merited--
+  Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
+        Alack, thou knowest not
+  How little worthy of any love thou art!
+  Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
+        Save Me, save only Me?
+  All which I took from thee I did but take,
+        Not for thy harms,
+  But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
+        All which thy child's mistake
+  Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
+        Rise, clasp My hand, and come."
+          Halts by me that footfall:
+          Is my gloom, after all,
+    Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
+          "Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
+          I am He Whom thou seekest!
+  Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."
+
+
+
+[Illustration: That Voice is round me like a bursting sea]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Back end papers]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
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+<TITLE>
+The Project Gutenberg E-text of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
+</TITLE>
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+<BODY>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Hound of Heaven
+
+Author: Francis Thompson
+
+Illustrator: Stella Langdale
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #30730]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUND OF HEAVEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-cover"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-cover.jpg" ALT="Cover art" BORDER="2" WIDTH="438" HEIGHT="668">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-fp.jpg" ALT="Front end papers" BORDER="2" WIDTH="856" HEIGHT="659">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+</H2>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-000"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-000.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="166">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-002"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-002.jpg" ALT="When she lit her glimmering tapers, Round the day's dead sanctities" BORDER="2" WIDTH="399" HEIGHT="636">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 399px">
+When she lit her glimmering tapers<BR>
+Round the day's dead sanctities  <I>Page 52</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-003"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-003.jpg" ALT="Title page" BORDER="2" WIDTH="332" HEIGHT="538">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H1 ALIGN="center">
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+</H1>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+<I>By</I> FRANCIS THOMPSON
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+<BR>
+STELLA LANGDALE
+</H3>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H4 ALIGN="center">
+NEW YORK
+<BR>
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+<BR>
+1926
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<H5 ALIGN="center">
+COPYRIGHT, 1922,
+<BR>
+BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
+<BR><BR>
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+</H5>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="intro"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+INTRODUCTION
+</H3>
+
+<P>
+The Rev. Mark J. McNeal, S. J., who was one of the successors of
+Lafcadio Hearn in the chair of English Literature at the Tokyo Imperial
+University, in an interesting article recounts the following incident
+of his experience in that institution.  "I was seated on the examining
+board with Professor Ichikawa, the dean of the English department...
+There entered the room a student whom I recognized as among the best in
+the class, a sharp young chap with big Mongolian eyes, and one who had
+never to my knowledge given any hint of even a leaning toward
+Christianity.  I remembered, however, that his thesis submitted for a
+degree had been a study of Francis Thompson.  Following the usual
+custom, I began to question him about his thesis.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Why did you choose Thompson?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, he is quite a famous poet.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'What kind of poet is he?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'We might call him a mystic.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Is he a mystic of the orthodox sort, like Cynewulf or Crashaw; or an
+unorthodox mystic, like Blake or Shelley?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Oh, he's orthodox.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, now, what do you consider his greatest production?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Why, I should say "The Hound of Heaven."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, what on earth does Thompson mean by that Hound?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'He means God.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'But is not that a rather irreverent way for Thompson to be talking
+about God, calling Him a hound?  What does he mean by comparing God to
+a hound?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, he means the pursuit of God.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Oh, I see, Thompson is pursuing God, is he?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Oh, no.  He is rather running away from God.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, then, God is pursuing Thompson, is that it?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Yes, that's it.'
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-006"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-006.jpg" ALT="Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears" BORDER="2" WIDTH="408" HEIGHT="598">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 408px">
+Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears  <I>Page 45</I>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+'"But, see here; according to Thompson's belief God is everywhere,
+isn't He?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Yes.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'Well, then, how can God be going after Thompson?  Is it a physical
+pursuit?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'No.  It is a moral pursuit.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'A moral pursuit!  What's that?  What is God after?'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"'He is after Thompson's love.'
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"And then we, the Jesuit and the Buddhist, began to follow the windings
+and turnings of that wondrous poem, the most mystic and spiritual thing
+that has been written since St. Teresa laid down her pen.  What the
+other member of the examining board thought of it all I never heard.
+But I think I acquired a satisfactory answer to that question so often
+put to me: Can the Japanese really grasp a spiritual truth?  Do they
+really get at the meaning of Christianity?  This, of a race that has
+produced more martyrs than any other nation since the fall of Rome and
+that kept the Faith for two centuries without a visible symbol or
+document!"
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The incident supplies matter for other conclusions more germane to the
+subject of this essay.  The late Bert Leston Taylor, a journalist whose
+journalism had a literary facet of critical brilliance, once declared
+that he could not perceive the excellence of Francis Thompson's poetry.
+When someone suggested that it might be that he was not spiritual
+enough, the retort was laconic and crushing, "Or, perhaps, not
+ecclesiastical enough."  Like most good retorts Taylor's had more wit
+than truth.  He was obsessed by the notion, prevalent among a certain
+class of literary critics, that Francis Thompson's fame was the
+artificially stimulated applause of a Catholic coterie, whose
+enthusiasm could hardly be shared by readers with no particular
+curiosity about Catholic ideas or modes of religion.  It was probably
+this obsession which prompted that able critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, to
+write to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell when the "Hound of Heaven" first appeared:
+"I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable poet, but, if he
+is ever to become other than a 'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'&mdash;if
+indeed it is worth anyone's ambition to be other than that&mdash;it will
+only be by working in a different manner.  A 'public' to appreciate the
+'Hound of Heaven' is to me inconceivable."  Mr. William Archer, an
+experienced judge of popular likes, was of the same opinion.  "Yet,"
+Francis Thompson's biographer tells us, "in the three years after
+Thompson's death the separate edition of the 'Hound of Heaven' sold
+fifty thousand copies; and, apart from anthologies, many more thousands
+were sold of the books containing it."  When the "Hound of Heaven" is
+selected for study, and explained in words of one syllable, by a young
+Japanese student in the Tokyo Imperial University almost thirty years
+after the poem was published, one can hardly maintain that it calls for
+certain ecclesiastical affiliations before it can be understood and
+felt, or that its "public" is necessarily circumscribed.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It must be owned indeed that Francis Thompson was a puzzle to his
+contemporaries of the nineties.  He paid the usual penalty of vaulting
+originality.  The decade is famous for its bold experiments and shining
+successes in the art of poetry.  One might expect that a public, grown
+accustomed to exquisitely wrought novelties and eager to extend them a
+welcome, would have been preordained to recognize and hail the genius
+of Thompson.  But it was not so.  The estheticism of the nineties, for
+all its sweet and fragile flowers, was rooted in the dark passions of
+the flesh.  Its language was the language of death and despair and
+annihilation and the Epicurean need of exhausting the hedonistic
+possibilities of life ere the final engulfing in darkness and silence.
+When the speech of Thompson, laden with religion and spirituality and
+Christian mystery, broke with golden turbulence upon the world of the
+nineties, the critics were abashed and knew not what to think of it.
+The effect was somewhat like that produced by Attwater, in Stevenson's
+"The Ebb-Tide," when he began suddenly to discourse on Divine Grace to
+the amazement of Herrick and his crew of scoundrels from the stolen
+<I>Farallone</I>.  "Oh," exclaimed the unspeakable Huish, when they had
+recovered breath, "Oh, look 'ere, turn down the lights at once, and the
+Band of 'Ope will oblige!  This ain't a spiritual séance."  It had
+something akin to the madness of poor Christopher Smart when he fell
+into the habit of dropping on his knees and praying in the crowded
+London streets.  There was incongruity, verging on the indecent, in
+this intrusion of religion into art, as if an archangel were to attend
+an afternoon tea in Mayfair or an absinthe session in a Bohemian cafe.
+It was, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "an unnecessary deviation from the
+usual modes of the world" which struck the world dumb.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The poetry of Francis Thompson appeared in three small volumes:
+"Poems," published in 1893; "Sister Songs," in 1895; and "New Poems,"
+in 1897.  The first of these volumes contained the "Hound of Heaven";
+though it staggered reviewers at large, they yielded dubious and
+carefully measured praise and waited for developments.  The pack was
+unleashed and the hue-and-cry raised on the coming of "Sister Songs"
+and "New Poems."  Andrew Lang and Mr. Arthur Symons led the chorus of
+disapproval.  It is amusing to read now that Francis Thompson's "faults
+are fundamental.  Though he uses the treasure of the Temple, he is not
+a religious poet.  The note of a true spiritual passion never once
+sounds in his book."  Another critic of the poet declares that "nothing
+could be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression
+it leaves on the mind.  It is like a dictionary of obsolete English
+suffering from a severe fit of delirium tremens."  A prominent literary
+periodical saw, in the attempt to foist Thompson on the public as a
+genuine poet, a sectarian effort to undermine the literary press of
+England.  In the course of a year the sale of "Sister Songs" amounted
+to 349 copies.  The "New Poems" fared worse; its sale, never large,
+practically ceased a few years after its appearance, three copies being
+sold during the first six months of 1902.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-012"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-012.jpg" ALT="Across the margent of the world I fled" BORDER="2" WIDTH="406" HEIGHT="638">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 406px">
+Across the margent of the world I fled  <I>Page 47</I>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+And all this despite strong recommendations from fastidious quarters.
+George Meredith's recognition was instantaneous and unreserved.
+Henley's was accompanied by reproofs.  Mr. Richard LeGallienne was
+enthusiastic.  Mr. William Archer said to a friend, "This is not work
+which can possibly be <I>popular</I> in the wide sense; but it is work that
+will be read and treasured centuries hence by those who really care for
+poetry."  And he wrote to Thompson, "I assure you no conceivable
+reaction can wipe out or overlay such work as yours.  It is firm-based
+on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say all the more confidently
+because it does not happen to appeal to my own speculative, or even my
+own literary, prejudices."  The most extravagant admirer of all, and
+the one who will probably turn out to have come nearer the mark than
+any of Francis Thompson's contemporaries, was Mr. J. L. Garvin, the
+well known English leader-writer in politics and literature.  "After
+the publication of his second volume," he wrote in the English
+<I>Bookman</I>, March 1897, "when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven'
+and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical
+sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the
+highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets.
+The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature.  The 'Hound of
+Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' are the second greatest; and there is no
+third.  In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic
+mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography....  Even with the
+greatest pages of 'Sister Songs' sounding in one's ears, one is
+sometimes tempted to think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's
+high-water mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import&mdash;if we do
+damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he
+thrusts the word upon us.  We do not think we forget any of the
+splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of
+Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we
+consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language.  It
+fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and
+dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the
+very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad music of humanity.  It
+is the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas à Kempis....  The
+regal air, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, Mr. Thompson
+has them all.  A rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
+has never been known to poetry.  To many this will seem the simple
+delirium of over-emphasis.  The writer signs for those others, nowise
+ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a
+living poet, Francis Thompson."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+We do not associate Mr. Arnold Bennett with any of the ideas in
+religion or literature which supplied impulse to Francis Thompson.  It
+is a surprise of the first magnitude to find him carried away into the
+rapture of prophecy by the "Sister Songs."  "I declare," he says in an
+article appearing in July, 1895, "that for three days after this book
+appeared I read nothing else.  I went about repeating snatches of
+it&mdash;snatches such as&mdash;
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+'The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,<BR>
+Moves all the labouring surges of the world.'<BR>
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer
+poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare.  Show me the
+divinest glories of Shelley and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the
+'Lotus Eaters' and the songs in the 'Princess,' and I think I can match
+them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at
+an ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary prosaic crown.  I fear
+that in thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly outraging
+the canons of criticism.  For the man is alive, he gets up of a morning
+like common mortals, not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and
+every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet must not be
+called great until he is dead or very old.  Well, please yourself what
+you think.  But, in time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."  A
+whole generation of men has passed away since these words appeared; but
+they do not seem to be so fantastic and whimsical now as they seemed to
+be then.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-016"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-016.jpg" ALT="I said to dawn: Be sudden" BORDER="2" WIDTH="405" HEIGHT="661">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 405px">
+I said to dawn: Be sudden  <I>Page 47</I>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It can scarcely be claimed that the prophecies of Meredith, Mr. Garvin,
+and Mr. Arnold Bennett were of the kind which ultimately assures the
+event.  The reading-world dipped curiously into the pages about which
+there was so much conflict of opinion; it was startled and bewildered
+by a novel and difficult form of verse; and finally it agreed with the
+majority of critics that it was mostly nonsense&mdash;too Catholic to be
+catholic.  The poems sold badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best.  It
+is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time.  Even Thompson's
+coreligionists were cold.  Indeed, it may be said they were the
+coldest.  If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected
+Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the
+Catholic public feared him for his art.  It was a wild unfettered thing
+which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be
+trusted to run in divine grooves.  One can afford to extenuate the
+attitude of reserve.  It was a period when brilliant heterodoxies and
+flaunting decadence were in the air.  The fact is, that critics and
+public delivered Thompson over to the Catholics; and the Catholics
+would have nothing to do with him.  Canon Sheehan could write of
+Thompson in 1898:
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"Only two Catholics&mdash;literary Catholics&mdash;have noticed this surprising
+genius&mdash;Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell.  The vast bulk of our
+coreligionists have not even heard his name, although it is already
+bruited amongst the Immortals; and the great Catholic poet, for whose
+advent we have been straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes,
+sung his immortal songs, and vanished."  This was written almost ten
+years before Thompson died, but after his resolve to write no more
+poetry.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+It is easily within the probabilities that, small as was Thompson's
+audience during his lifetime, it would have been still smaller but for
+the extraneous interest excited by the strange story of his life.  He
+was born on December 16, 1859, in Preston, Lancashire, whence he went
+at the age of eleven to Ushaw College, a Catholic boarding school for
+boys.  This is the college where Lafcadio Hearn received his education;
+he had left the school a year or two before young Thompson's arrival.
+Both boys were designed for the priesthood.  Hearn lost his faith then
+or shortly afterwards: Thompson's irregular habits of dreamy
+abstraction rendered him unfit for a sacerdotal career.  When he had
+completed his course at college, where he had distinguished himself in
+English composition and attained respectable standing in the classics,
+his father, a hard-working physician, entered the lad, now eighteen, as
+a student of medicine in Owen College, Manchester.  The Thompson family
+had moved from Preston to Ashton-under-Lyne, where proximity to
+Manchester made it possible for the young medical student to spend his
+nights at home.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Francis was of the silent and secretive sort where he could not hope to
+find intelligent sympathy.  This, and some cloudy compromise with his
+sense of filial dutifulness, will perhaps explain why he passed six
+years as a student of medicine without any serious purpose of becoming
+a physician and without informing his father of his disinclination.
+Three examinations and three failures at intervals of a year were
+necessary to convince the father of the true state of affairs.  Stern
+measures were adopted; and, although the consequences were pitifully
+tragical, it is hard to blame the father of Francis.  How are we to
+discover the extraordinary seal in a case that requires special and
+extraordinary treatment?
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Francis was twenty-four years old with no more idea than a child's of
+how life is planned on practical lines of prosperity.  The senior
+Thompson thought it time for him to learn and issued orders to find
+employment of some remunerative kind.  Accordingly during the next two
+years Francis served indifferently for brief periods as a clerk in the
+shop of a maker of surgical instruments and as a canvasser of an
+encyclopedia.  Both experiments in the art of making a living were
+failures, increasing paternal dissatisfaction.  The desperate young man
+then enlisted in the army, and after a few weeks' of drilling was
+rejected on the score of physical weakness.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-020"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-020.jpg" ALT="I knew how the clouds arise, Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings" BORDER="2" WIDTH="408" HEIGHT="638">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 408px">
+I knew how the clouds arise,<BR>
+Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings  <I>Page 51</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+During these shiftless and unhappy years as a listless medical student
+and laggard apprentice the poet's chief solace was the public library
+of Manchester.  In his daily absences from home his misery suggested
+another solace of a sinister kind.  After a severe illness during his
+second year of medicine his mother, says his biographer, presented him
+with a copy of De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater."  It is
+incredible that a <I>helluo librorum</I>, like Thompson, should have reached
+the age of twenty without ever having read a book which is one of the
+first to attract every bright school-boy.  This would be particularly
+true of a school-boy who lived near Manchester, De Quincey's own town.
+But the evidence seems to be against probabilities.  Thompson succumbed
+completely to the influence of the great genius whose temper and
+circumstances of life were singularly like his own.  Experiments in
+laudanum were made and habits contracted which accentuated a natural
+unfitness to wrestle with the practical problems of getting on and
+rendered family intercourse drearier than ever.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+In 1885, when he was twenty-six years old, Francis decided to leave
+home.  After a week in Manchester he requested and received from his
+father the price of a railway ticket for London.  The trip to the vast
+and strange city must have been made with only the vaguest of plans for
+the future.  The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than
+to rid his father of his vexatious presence.  There were friends in
+London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly
+allowance from home.  But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man
+away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after
+a while came to be unclaimed.  The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge
+city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of
+their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him.  In a period
+extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a
+vagrant in the streets and alleys.  He made one or two brave essays at
+regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success.
+The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged
+and gaunt roustabout contained no useful hints for the difficulties of
+the peculiar situation; its harshness could be transmuted into
+temporary and blessed oblivion by a drug whenever the means for
+purchase could be acquired.  The Guildhall Library was much frequented
+until shabbiness was excluded by the policeman.  This outcast poet,
+approaching thirty years of age, was at various times a bootblack, a
+newsboy, a vendor of matches, a nocturnal denizen of wharves and
+lounger on the benches of city-parks.  His cough-racked frame was the
+exposed target of cold and rain and winds.  He became used to hunger.
+At one time a six-pence, for holding a horse, was his only earnings for
+a week.  It was while he was aimlessly roaming the streets one night
+almost delirious from starvation that a prosperous shoe-merchant,
+benevolently engaged in religious rescue-work, came across Thompson,
+and, struck by the incongruity of his gentle speech, induced him to
+accept employment in his shop.  But one cannot allow business to suffer
+on account of an inveterate blunderer, even though the blunderer wear
+wings and has endeared himself to the family.  Mr. McMaster, kindly
+Anglican lay-missionary, who deserves grateful remembrance for
+recognizing and temporarily helping merit under the most deceptive
+disguise, was obliged much against his inclination to dismiss Francis
+and to allow him to fall back into the pit of squalor and vagabondage.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But the few months of reprieve had supplied Thompson with the impulse
+to write.  Shortly after he was dropped from the McMaster establishment
+Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, the editor of <I>Merry England</I>, a Catholic
+magazine, received the following letter: "<I>Feb. 23rd, '87</I>&mdash;Dear
+Sir,&mdash;In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must
+ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript.  It is due, not to
+slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which
+it has been written.  For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse
+experience has something fouled.  I enclose stamped envelope for a
+reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding
+your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final.  I can hardly expect
+that where my prose fails my verse will succeed.  Nevertheless, on the
+principle of 'Yet will I try the last,' I have added a few specimens of
+it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
+Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I
+remain yours with little hope,
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+"Francis Thompson.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+"Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office."
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-024"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-024.jpg" ALT="Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke! ..... smitten me to my knee; I am defenceless utterly" BORDER="2" WIDTH="410" HEIGHT="656">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 410px">
+Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!<BR>
+..... smitten me to my knee;<BR>
+I am defenceless utterly   <I>Page 55</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The unpromising aspect of the manuscript, thus introduced, was the
+occasion of editorial neglect for some months.  When at last Mr.
+Meynell gave it his attention he was electrified into action.  He wrote
+to the address given by Thompson.  The letter was returned from the
+dead-letter office after many days.  Then he published one of the poems
+mentioned in the letter, "The Passion of Mary," in the hope that the
+author would disclose his whereabouts.  The plan succeeded and brought
+a letter from Thompson with a new address.  Mr. Meynell tried to waylay
+him at the new address, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane, but with
+characteristic shiftlessness the poet forgot to call there for possible
+letters.  But the seller of drugs finally established communications
+between the editor and the poet, and one day, more than a year after
+Thompson's first literary venture had been sent, he visited the office
+of <I>Merry England</I>.  Mr. Everard Meynell, the poet's biographer, thus
+describes the entrance of the poet into his father's sanctum.  "My
+father was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him.  'Show him up,' he
+said, and was left alone.  Then the door opened, and a strange hand was
+thrust in.  The door closed, but Thompson had not entered.  Again it
+opened, again it shut.  At the third attempt a waif of a man came in.
+No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the
+average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken
+shoes, he found my father at a loss for words.  'You must have had
+access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said.
+'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that
+afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented
+mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails.  I had no books
+by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be
+done for him at that interview save the extraction of a promise to call
+again.  He made none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking
+sympathy and alms.  He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans
+for his benefit, and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would
+enable him to sleep in a bed and sit at a table."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+By patience and delicately offered kindnesses Mr. and Mrs. Meynell at
+length won the difficult privilege of helping the shy, nervous,
+high-strung spirit wandering in pain, hunger and exile amid the
+indecencies of extreme penury in a great city.  They were helped by the
+friendly sympathy and care of Premonstratensian and Franciscan monks.
+Thompson had sounded, and become familiar with, the depths of social
+degradation in all its external aspects of sordidness.  The most
+extraordinary part of his singular experience is that he affords a
+striking instance of the triumph of soul and mind over beleaguering
+circumstance.  The nightmare of his environment failed to subdue him.
+He preserved his spiritual sensitiveness, and literary ideals of a most
+exalted kind, through the most depressing and demoralizing experiences.
+The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell,
+entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan
+ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could
+walk unstained among the world's impurities.  "Bring back then, I say,
+in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on
+the cheek.  But you <I>cannot</I> bring back the best age of Paganism, the
+age when Paganism was a faith.  None will again behold Apollo in the
+forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the
+long lustre of her golden locks.  But you <I>may</I> bring back&mdash;<I>dii
+avertant omen</I>&mdash;the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and Statius, and
+Juvenal; of much philosophy, and little belief; of superb villas and
+superb taste; of banquets for the palate in the shape of cookery, and
+banquets for the eye in the shape of art; of poetry singing dead songs
+on dead themes with the most polished and artistic vocalisation; of
+everything most polished, from the manners to the marble floors; of
+vice carefully drained out of sight, and large fountains of virtue
+springing in the open air;&mdash;in one word, a most shining Paganism
+indeed&mdash;as putrescence also shines."  Unlike George Gissing and so many
+others who had to wade to celebrity through sloughs of bitter
+destitution, Francis Thompson felt no inclination to capitalize his
+expert knowledge of back streets and alleys for profit and the morbid
+entertainment of the curious.  His single failing in yielding to the
+attraction of an insidious drug seemed to be impotent to affect his
+high admirations and his clear perceptions in the regions of honor and
+religion.
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-028"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-028.jpg" ALT="Yea, faileth now even dream, The dreamer" BORDER="2" WIDTH="412" HEIGHT="669">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 412px">
+Yea, faileth now even dream<BR>
+The dreamer  <I>Page 55</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+It is surely one of the literary glories of a distinguished family that
+Mr. and Mrs. Meynell succeeded in helping Thompson to emancipate
+himself from the enslavement of a tyrannic habit.  His poetic genius
+began to flower in the new liberty.  For the next ten years interest in
+his poetry and literary friends and connections, few and select, made
+his life comparatively happy.  But he maintained a large measure of
+independence to the last.  That he was never ungrateful to those who
+befriended him, his poems are ample proof.  But in London he always had
+his own lodgings in a cheap but respectable quarter of the city.  His
+unpunctual and preoccupied manner sometimes created small distresses
+for his devoted friends to relieve.  During the last ten years of his
+life he wrote little poetry.  His vitality, never vigorous, was ebbing
+and unequal to the demands of inspired verse.  But during these years
+of decline he wrote much golden prose.  He was a regular and highly
+valued contributor to the <I>Academy</I>, the <I>Athenaeum</I>, the <I>Nation</I>, and
+the <I>Daily Chronicle</I>.  One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere
+industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work.  The published
+volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and
+allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage
+of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope
+to scale.  In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on
+Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose
+seems to be carried off its feet, as it were, in a very storm of poetic
+impulse.  The published essays are not a tithe of Thompson's writings
+for the press.  Moreover, we have a study of Blessed John de la Salle,
+a little volume on "Health and Holiness," and a large "Life of St.
+Ignatius Loyola," none of them suggesting even remotely the plantigrade
+writing of the mechanical hack.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+During the last year of his life, when consumption had almost
+completely undermined resistance, his old habit reasserted its empire.
+But it was not for long, and can hardly be said to have hastened the
+end, which came on November 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and
+St. Elizabeth.  He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, and
+on his coffin were roses from George Meredith's garden, with the
+poet-novelist's message: "A true poet, one of the small band."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The "Hound of Heaven" has been called the greatest ode in the English
+language.  Such was the contemporary verdict of some of the most
+respected critics of the time, and the conviction of its justness
+deepens with the passing of years.  Recall the writers of great odes,
+Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Collins, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley,
+Coleridge,&mdash;the best they have done will not outstare the "Hound of
+Heaven."  Where shall we find its equal for exaltation of mood that
+knows no fatigue from the first word to the last?  The motion of
+angelic hosts must be like the movement of this ode, combining in some
+marvellous and mysterious way the swiftness of lightning with the
+stately progress of a pageant white with the blinding white light of an
+awful Presence.  The note of modernness is the quality which is most
+likely to mislead us in forecasting favorably the durability of
+contemporary poetry, appealing as it does to so many personal issues
+irrelevant to the standards of immortal art.  This is precisely the
+note which is least conspicuous in the "Hound of Heaven."  The poem
+might have been written in the days of Shakespeare, or, in a different
+speech, by Dante or Calderon.  The Rev. Francis P. LeBuffe, S. J., has
+written an interesting book on the "Hound of Heaven," pointing out the
+analogy between the poem and the psalms of David; and another Jesuit,
+the late Rev. J. F. X. O'Connor, in a published "Study" of the poem,
+says that in it Francis Thompson "seems to sing, in verse, the thought
+of St. Ignatius in the spiritual exercises,&mdash;the thought of St. Paul in
+the tender, insistent love of Christ for the soul, and the yearning of
+Christ for that soul which ever runs after creatures, till the love of
+Christ wakens in it a love of its God, which dims and deadens all love
+of creatures except through love for Him.  This was the love of St.
+Paul, of St. Ignatius, of St. Stanislaus, of St. Francis of Assist, of
+St. Clare, of St. Teresa."
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-032"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-032.jpg" ALT="The hid battlements of Eternity: Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again" BORDER="2" WIDTH="408" HEIGHT="656">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 408px">
+The hid battlements of Eternity:<BR>
+Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then<BR>
+Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again  <I>Page 56</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+The neologisms and archaic words employed in the poem seem to be a
+legitimate and instinctive effort of the poet's inspiration to soar
+above the limitations of time and to liberate itself from the transient
+accretions of a living, and therefore constantly changing, mode of
+speech.  He strove after an enfranchisement of utterance, devoid of
+stratifying peculiarities, assignable to no age or epoch, and
+understood of all.  A soul-shaking thought, prevalent throughout
+Christendom, was felt imaginatively by a highly endowed poet, and, like
+impetuous volcanic fires that fling heavenward mighty fragments and
+boulders of mountain in their red release, found magnificent expression
+in elemental grandeurs of language, shot through with the wild lights
+of hidden flames and transcending all pettiness of calculated artifice
+and fugitive fashion.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+The dominating idea in the "Hound of Heaven" is so familiar, so&mdash;one
+might say&mdash;innate, that it is almost impudent to undertake to explain
+it.  Even in the cases of persons to whom the reading of poetry is an
+uncultivated and difficult art, there is an instantaneous leap of
+recognition as the thought emerges from the cloudy glories of the poem.
+Still, modern popular systems of philosophy are so dehumanizing in
+their tendencies, and so productive of what may be called secondary and
+artificially planted instincts, that it is perhaps not entirely useless
+to attempt to elucidate the obvious.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The heavens," says Hazlitt, "have gone farther off and become
+astronomical."  The home-like conception of the universe in mediaeval
+times, when dying was like going out of one room into another, and man
+entertained a neighborly feeling for the angels, has a tendency to
+disappear as science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and
+space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life.  The curious notion
+has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every
+new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation.  God would
+seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty,
+stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing
+weight of the evidences of His Infinity.  We have modern thinkers
+regarding Christian notions of the Godhead as impossible to a mind
+acquainted with the paralyzing revelations of scientific knowledge.
+The late John Fiske used to deride what he called the anthromorphism of
+the Christian idea of God, as of a venerable, white-bearded man.  And
+these philosophers deem it more reverent to deny any personal
+relationship between God and man for the reason that God is too great
+to be interested in man, and man too little to be an object of interest.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Before indicating the essential error of this attitude, it is necessary
+to state, merely for the sake of historical accuracy, that the
+Christian conception of the Godhead, as expressed by St. Thomas
+Aquinas, Dante, Lessius, and a host of Christian writers, has never
+been approached in its sublime suggestions of Infinite and Eternal
+power and glory by any modern philosopher.  In the second and third
+Lectures of Cardinal Newman's, "Scope and Nature of University
+Education," there is an outline of the Christian teaching of the nature
+of God which, in painstaking accuracy of thought and sheer grandeur of
+conception, has no counterpart in modern literature.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Let us always remember that telescope and microscope in all the range
+of their discoveries have not uncovered the existence of anything
+greater than man himself.  The most massive star of the Milky Way is
+not so wonderful as the smallest human child.  Moreover man's present
+entourage of illimitable space and countless circling suns and planets
+cannot be said to have cost an omnipotent God more trouble, so to
+speak, than a universe a million times smaller.  The prodigality of the
+Creator reveals His endless resources; if the vision of sidereal
+abysses and flaming globes intimidates me and makes me cynical about my
+unimportance, is it not because I have lost the high consciousness of a
+spiritual being and forgotten the unplumbed chasms which separate
+matter from mind?
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-036"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-036.jpg" ALT="Whether man's heart or life it be which yields Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields Be dunged with rotten death?" BORDER="2" WIDTH="403" HEIGHT="664">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 403px">
+Whether man's heart or life it be which yields<BR>
+Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields<BR>
+Be dunged with rotten death?  <I>Page 57</I>]<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<P>
+In Francis Thompson's Catholic philosophy, which must be partially
+understood if the reader is to get at the heart of the "Hound of
+Heaven," the tremendous manifestations of God's attributes of power
+prepare us to expect equally tremendous manifestations of His
+attributes of love.  The more prodigal God is discovered to be in
+lavish expenditures of omnipotence in the material universe, the more
+alert the soul becomes to look for and to detect overwhelming surprises
+of Divine Love.  Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the
+special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the
+cross, and His sacramental life in the Church.  The Divine energy of
+God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself,
+seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of
+creation displayed in the revelation of nature.  Every new revelation
+of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore
+a balance in our mind between God's power and God's love.  The more
+astronomical the heavens become, the closer they bring God to us.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Another conception of God to be kept in mind, if we are to grasp the
+meaning of the "Hound of Heaven," is the omniscient character, the
+infinite perfection, of God's knowledge.  God sees each of us as fully
+and completely as if there were no one else and nothing else to see
+except us.  Practically speaking, God gives each one of us His
+undivided attention.  And through this spacious channel of His Divine
+and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love.  The weak
+soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love.  It tries to
+elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which
+it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left
+us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of
+its true bliss.  The following passage is an excellent commentary on
+the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to
+love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor
+little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its
+whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all
+it has to yield.  It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the
+upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the
+constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it.  It falls
+back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own
+plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital,
+where no upward effort is needful.  And it ends by giving for the
+meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
+self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God.  Even (how
+rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and
+unsatiated it leaves the soul.  One always is less generous to love
+than the other."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it
+to a happiness which affrights it.  And the timid and self-seeking soul
+strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven,
+under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and
+study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature,
+if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle
+accents of pursuivant Love.  But all things are in league with God, Who
+made and rules them.  They cannot conspire against Him.  They betray
+the refugee.  He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find
+the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly.  The Divine
+thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of
+Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature.
+Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love.  The
+"Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul
+into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+JAMES J. DALY, S. J.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap00c"></A>
+
+<H3 ALIGN="center">
+OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"
+</H3>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capf.jpg" ALT="dropcap-f" BORDER="0" WIDTH="96" HEIGHT="93">
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+rancis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of
+his mature life in London where he died in 1907.  He was educated at
+Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College,
+Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.
+</P>
+
+<P>
+But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the
+consulting-room.  He walked to London in search of a living, finding,
+indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at
+length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others,
+and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which
+endured for a half-decade of years&mdash;his "Poems," his "Sister Songs,"
+and his "New Poems."
+</P>
+
+<P>
+"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to
+Thomas à Kempis."  The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in
+its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic
+Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his
+"Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite
+another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.
+</P>
+
+<P CLASS="noindent">
+W. M.
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-042"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-042.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="231" HEIGHT="280">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap00d"></A>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+</H2>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-002">
+When she lit her glimmering tapers . . . . . . . . .   <I>Frontispiece</I>
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-006">
+Titanic glooms of chasmed fears
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-012">
+Across the margent of the world I fled
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-016">
+I said to dawn: Be sudden
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-020">
+I knew how the clouds arise
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-024">
+Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-028">
+Yea, faileth now even dream
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-032">
+The hid battlements of Eternity
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-036">
+Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-045">
+I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside (missing from book)
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-048">
+Thunder-driven, They clanged His chariot
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-050">
+In her wind-walled palace
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-055">
+I shook the pillaring hours
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-056">
+And now my heart is as a broken fount
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<H4>
+<A HREF="#img-060">
+That Voice is round me like a bursting sea
+</A>
+</H4>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="chap01"></A>
+
+<A NAME="img-045"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-045.jpg" ALT="I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways, Of my own mind" BORDER="2" WIDTH="411" HEIGHT="644">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 411px">
+I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways<BR>
+Of my own mind<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<H2 ALIGN="center">
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+</H2>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capi.jpg" ALT="dropcap-i" BORDER="0" WIDTH="95" HEIGHT="94">
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+ fled Him, down the nights and down the days;<BR>
+I fled Him, down the arches of the years;<BR>
+I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears</SPAN><BR>
+I hid from Him, and under running laughter.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Up vistaed hopes, I sped;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">And shot, precipitated,</SPAN><BR>
+Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">But with unhurrying chase,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">And unperturbèd pace,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">They beat&mdash;and a Voice beat</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">More instant than the Feet&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<A NAME="img-046"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-046.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="2" WIDTH="228" HEIGHT="230">
+</CENTER>
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">I pleaded, out law-wise,</SPAN><BR>
+By many a hearted casement, curtained red,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Trellised with intertwining charities</SPAN><BR>
+(For, though I knew His love Who followèd,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Yet was I sore adread</SPAN><BR>
+Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside);<BR>
+But, if one little casement parted wide,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">The gust of His approach would clash it to.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.</SPAN><BR>
+Across the margent of the world I fled,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Fretted to dulcet jars</SPAN><BR>
+And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.<BR>
+I said to dawn: Be sudden; to eve: Be soon&mdash;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">From this tremendous Lover!</SPAN><BR>
+Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">I tempted all His servitors, but to find</SPAN><BR>
+My own betrayal in their constancy,<BR>
+In faith to Him their fickleness to me,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.</SPAN><BR>
+To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">The long savannahs of the blue;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Or whether, Thunder-driven,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven</SPAN><BR>
+Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:&mdash;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Still with unhurrying chase,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And unperturbèd pace,</SPAN><BR>
+Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Came on the following Feet,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And a Voice above their beat&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+"Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-048"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-048.jpg" ALT="Thunder-driven, They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven, Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet" BORDER="2" WIDTH="408" HEIGHT="654">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 408px">
+Thunder-driven,<BR>
+They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven<BR>
+Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-049"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-049.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="223" HEIGHT="219">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capi.jpg" ALT="dropcap-i" BORDER="0" WIDTH="95" HEIGHT="94">
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+ sought no more that after which I strayed<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">In face of man or maid;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">But still within the little children's eyes</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Seems something, something that replies,</SPAN><BR>
+<I>They</I> at least are for me, surely for me!<BR>
+I turned me to them very wistfully;<BR>
+But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">With dawning answers there,</SPAN><BR>
+Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-050"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-050.jpg" ALT="In her wind-walled palace" BORDER="2" WIDTH="412" HEIGHT="622">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 412px">
+In her wind-walled palace
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capc.jpg" ALT="dropcap-c" BORDER="0" WIDTH="96" HEIGHT="92">
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+ome then, ye other children,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Nature's&mdash;share</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Let me greet you lip to lip,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Let me twine with you caresses,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Wantoning</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Banqueting</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">With her in her wind-walled palace,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Underneath her azured daïs,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Quaffing, as your taintless way is,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">From a chalice</SPAN><BR>
+Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">So it was done;</SPAN><BR>
+<I>I</I> in their delicate fellowship was one&mdash;<BR>
+Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em"><I>I</I> knew all the swift importings</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">On the wilful face of skies;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">I knew how the clouds arise,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">All that's born or dies</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Rose and drooped with; made them shapers</SPAN><BR>
+Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine&mdash;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">With them joyed and was bereaven.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">I was heavy with the even,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">When she lit her glimmering tapers</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Round the day's dead sanctities.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">I laughed in the morning's eyes.</SPAN><BR>
+I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Heaven and I wept together,</SPAN><BR>
+And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;<BR>
+Against the red throb of its sunset-heart<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I laid my own to beat,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And share commingling heat;</SPAN><BR>
+But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.<BR>
+In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.<BR>
+For ah! we know not what each other says,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">These things and I; in sound <I>I</I> speak&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+<I>Their</I> sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.<BR>
+Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake by drouth;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Let her, if she would owe me,</SPAN><BR>
+Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">The breasts o' her tenderness:</SPAN><BR>
+Never did any milk of hers once bless<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">My thirsting mouth.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Nigh and nigh draws the chase,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">With unperturbèd pace,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And past those noisèd Feet</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">A Voice comes yet more fleet&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">"Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-054"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-054.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="232" HEIGHT="261">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-055"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-055.jpg" ALT="I shook the pillaring hours, And pulled my life upon me" BORDER="2" WIDTH="414" HEIGHT="650">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 414px">
+I shook the pillaring hours<BR>
+And pulled my life upon me<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capn.jpg" ALT="dropcap-n" BORDER="0" WIDTH="97" HEIGHT="99">
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+aked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!<BR>
+My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">And smitten me to my knee;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I am defenceless utterly.</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I slept, methinks, and woke,</SPAN><BR>
+And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.<BR>
+In the rash lustihead of my young powers,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I shook the pillaring hours</SPAN><BR>
+And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,<BR>
+I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years&mdash;<BR>
+My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.<BR>
+My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,<BR>
+Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 2em">Yea, faileth now even dream</SPAN><BR>
+The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;<BR>
+Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist<BR>
+I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,<BR>
+Are yielding; cords of all too weak account<BR>
+For earth, with heavy griefs so overplussed.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Ah! is Thy love indeed</SPAN><BR>
+A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,<BR>
+Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Ah! must&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Designer infinite!&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?<BR>
+My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;<BR>
+And now my heart is as a broken fount,<BR>
+Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">From the dank thoughts that shiver</SPAN><BR>
+Upon the sighful branches of my mind.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Such is; what is to be?</SPAN><BR>
+The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?<BR>
+I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;<BR>
+Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds<BR>
+From the hid battlements of Eternity:<BR>
+Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then<BR>
+Round the half-glimpsèd turrets slowly wash again;<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">But not ere Him who summoneth</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I first have seen, enwound</SPAN><BR>
+And now my heart is as a broken fount,<BR>
+Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever<BR>
+From the dank thoughts that shiver<BR>
+With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;<BR>
+His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.<BR>
+Whether man's heart or life it be which yields<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Be dunged with rotten death?</SPAN><BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-056"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-056.jpg" ALT="And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever, From the dank thoughts that shiver" BORDER="2" WIDTH="420" HEIGHT="667">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 420px">
+And now my heart is as a broken fount,<BR>
+Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever<BR>
+From the dank thoughts that shiver<BR>
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-058"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-058.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="234" HEIGHT="253">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<IMG CLASS="imgleft" SRC="images/img-capn.jpg" ALT="dropcap-n" BORDER="0" WIDTH="97" HEIGHT="99">
+
+<P CLASS="poem">
+ow of that long pursuit<BR>
+Comes on at hand the bruit;<BR>
+That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">"And is thy earth so marred,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Shattered in shard on shard?</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Strange, piteous, futile thing,</SPAN><BR>
+Wherefore should any set thee love apart?<BR>
+Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),<BR>
+"And human love needs human meriting:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">How hast thou merited&mdash;</SPAN><BR>
+Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Alack, thou knowest not</SPAN><BR>
+How little worthy of any love thou art!<BR>
+Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Save Me, save only Me?</SPAN><BR>
+All which I took from thee I did but take,<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Not for thy harms,</SPAN><BR>
+But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">All which thy child's mistake</SPAN><BR>
+Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:<BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 3em">Rise, clasp My hand, and come."</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Halts by me that footfall:</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">Is my gloom, after all,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 1em">Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,</SPAN><BR>
+<SPAN STYLE="margin-left: 4em">I am He Whom thou seekest!</SPAN><BR>
+Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."<BR>
+</P>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-060"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-060.jpg" ALT="That Voice is round me like a bursting sea" BORDER="2" WIDTH="413" HEIGHT="639">
+<H4 CLASS="h4center" STYLE="width: 413px">
+That Voice is round me like a bursting sea
+</H4>
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<A NAME="img-061"></A>
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-061.jpg" ALT="" BORDER="" WIDTH="241" HEIGHT="257">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR>
+
+<CENTER>
+<IMG CLASS="imgcenter" SRC="images/img-fp.jpg" ALT="Back end papers" BORDER="2" WIDTH="856" HEIGHT="659">
+</CENTER>
+
+<BR><BR><BR><BR>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
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+</pre>
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+</BODY>
+
+</HTML>
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Hound of Heaven
+
+Author: Francis Thompson
+
+Illustrator: Stella Langdale
+
+Release Date: December 21, 2009 [EBook #30730]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUND OF HEAVEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Front end papers]
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece:
+
+  When she lit her glimmering tapers
+  Round the day's dead sanctities  _Page 52_]
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Title page]
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+_By_ FRANCIS THOMPSON
+
+
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+
+STELLA LANGDALE
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
+
+1926
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1922,
+
+BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+The Rev. Mark J. McNeal, S. J., who was one of the successors of
+Lafcadio Hearn in the chair of English Literature at the Tokyo Imperial
+University, in an interesting article recounts the following incident
+of his experience in that institution.  "I was seated on the examining
+board with Professor Ichikawa, the dean of the English department...
+There entered the room a student whom I recognized as among the best in
+the class, a sharp young chap with big Mongolian eyes, and one who had
+never to my knowledge given any hint of even a leaning toward
+Christianity.  I remembered, however, that his thesis submitted for a
+degree had been a study of Francis Thompson.  Following the usual
+custom, I began to question him about his thesis.
+
+"'Why did you choose Thompson?'
+
+"'Well, he is quite a famous poet.'
+
+"'What kind of poet is he?'
+
+"'We might call him a mystic.'
+
+"'Is he a mystic of the orthodox sort, like Cynewulf or Crashaw; or an
+unorthodox mystic, like Blake or Shelley?'
+
+"'Oh, he's orthodox.'
+
+"'Well, now, what do you consider his greatest production?'
+
+"'Why, I should say "The Hound of Heaven."
+
+"'Well, what on earth does Thompson mean by that Hound?'
+
+"'He means God.'
+
+"'But is not that a rather irreverent way for Thompson to be talking
+about God, calling Him a hound?  What does he mean by comparing God to
+a hound?'
+
+"'Well, he means the pursuit of God.'
+
+"'Oh, I see, Thompson is pursuing God, is he?'
+
+"'Oh, no.  He is rather running away from God.'
+
+"'Well, then, God is pursuing Thompson, is that it?'
+
+"'Yes, that's it.'
+
+[Illustration: Titanic glooms of chasmed fears  _Page 45_]
+
+'"But, see here; according to Thompson's belief God is everywhere,
+isn't He?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'Well, then, how can God be going after Thompson?  Is it a physical
+pursuit?'
+
+"'No.  It is a moral pursuit.'
+
+"'A moral pursuit!  What's that?  What is God after?'
+
+"'He is after Thompson's love.'
+
+"And then we, the Jesuit and the Buddhist, began to follow the windings
+and turnings of that wondrous poem, the most mystic and spiritual thing
+that has been written since St. Teresa laid down her pen.  What the
+other member of the examining board thought of it all I never heard.
+But I think I acquired a satisfactory answer to that question so often
+put to me: Can the Japanese really grasp a spiritual truth?  Do they
+really get at the meaning of Christianity?  This, of a race that has
+produced more martyrs than any other nation since the fall of Rome and
+that kept the Faith for two centuries without a visible symbol or
+document!"
+
+The incident supplies matter for other conclusions more germane to the
+subject of this essay.  The late Bert Leston Taylor, a journalist whose
+journalism had a literary facet of critical brilliance, once declared
+that he could not perceive the excellence of Francis Thompson's poetry.
+When someone suggested that it might be that he was not spiritual
+enough, the retort was laconic and crushing, "Or, perhaps, not
+ecclesiastical enough."  Like most good retorts Taylor's had more wit
+than truth.  He was obsessed by the notion, prevalent among a certain
+class of literary critics, that Francis Thompson's fame was the
+artificially stimulated applause of a Catholic coterie, whose
+enthusiasm could hardly be shared by readers with no particular
+curiosity about Catholic ideas or modes of religion.  It was probably
+this obsession which prompted that able critic, Mr. H. D. Traill, to
+write to Mr. Wilfrid Meynell when the "Hound of Heaven" first appeared:
+"I quite agree with you in thinking him a remarkable poet, but, if he
+is ever to become other than a 'poet's poet' or 'critic's poet'--if
+indeed it is worth anyone's ambition to be other than that--it will
+only be by working in a different manner.  A 'public' to appreciate the
+'Hound of Heaven' is to me inconceivable."  Mr. William Archer, an
+experienced judge of popular likes, was of the same opinion.  "Yet,"
+Francis Thompson's biographer tells us, "in the three years after
+Thompson's death the separate edition of the 'Hound of Heaven' sold
+fifty thousand copies; and, apart from anthologies, many more thousands
+were sold of the books containing it."  When the "Hound of Heaven" is
+selected for study, and explained in words of one syllable, by a young
+Japanese student in the Tokyo Imperial University almost thirty years
+after the poem was published, one can hardly maintain that it calls for
+certain ecclesiastical affiliations before it can be understood and
+felt, or that its "public" is necessarily circumscribed.
+
+It must be owned indeed that Francis Thompson was a puzzle to his
+contemporaries of the nineties.  He paid the usual penalty of vaulting
+originality.  The decade is famous for its bold experiments and shining
+successes in the art of poetry.  One might expect that a public, grown
+accustomed to exquisitely wrought novelties and eager to extend them a
+welcome, would have been preordained to recognize and hail the genius
+of Thompson.  But it was not so.  The estheticism of the nineties, for
+all its sweet and fragile flowers, was rooted in the dark passions of
+the flesh.  Its language was the language of death and despair and
+annihilation and the Epicurean need of exhausting the hedonistic
+possibilities of life ere the final engulfing in darkness and silence.
+When the speech of Thompson, laden with religion and spirituality and
+Christian mystery, broke with golden turbulence upon the world of the
+nineties, the critics were abashed and knew not what to think of it.
+The effect was somewhat like that produced by Attwater, in Stevenson's
+"The Ebb-Tide," when he began suddenly to discourse on Divine Grace to
+the amazement of Herrick and his crew of scoundrels from the stolen
+_Farallone_.  "Oh," exclaimed the unspeakable Huish, when they had
+recovered breath, "Oh, look 'ere, turn down the lights at once, and the
+Band of 'Ope will oblige!  This ain't a spiritual seance."  It had
+something akin to the madness of poor Christopher Smart when he fell
+into the habit of dropping on his knees and praying in the crowded
+London streets.  There was incongruity, verging on the indecent, in
+this intrusion of religion into art, as if an archangel were to attend
+an afternoon tea in Mayfair or an absinthe session in a Bohemian cafe.
+It was, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, "an unnecessary deviation from the
+usual modes of the world" which struck the world dumb.
+
+The poetry of Francis Thompson appeared in three small volumes:
+"Poems," published in 1893; "Sister Songs," in 1895; and "New Poems,"
+in 1897.  The first of these volumes contained the "Hound of Heaven";
+though it staggered reviewers at large, they yielded dubious and
+carefully measured praise and waited for developments.  The pack was
+unleashed and the hue-and-cry raised on the coming of "Sister Songs"
+and "New Poems."  Andrew Lang and Mr. Arthur Symons led the chorus of
+disapproval.  It is amusing to read now that Francis Thompson's "faults
+are fundamental.  Though he uses the treasure of the Temple, he is not
+a religious poet.  The note of a true spiritual passion never once
+sounds in his book."  Another critic of the poet declares that "nothing
+could be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression
+it leaves on the mind.  It is like a dictionary of obsolete English
+suffering from a severe fit of delirium tremens."  A prominent literary
+periodical saw, in the attempt to foist Thompson on the public as a
+genuine poet, a sectarian effort to undermine the literary press of
+England.  In the course of a year the sale of "Sister Songs" amounted
+to 349 copies.  The "New Poems" fared worse; its sale, never large,
+practically ceased a few years after its appearance, three copies being
+sold during the first six months of 1902.
+
+[Illustration: Across the margent of the world I fled  _Page 47_]
+
+And all this despite strong recommendations from fastidious quarters.
+George Meredith's recognition was instantaneous and unreserved.
+Henley's was accompanied by reproofs.  Mr. Richard LeGallienne was
+enthusiastic.  Mr. William Archer said to a friend, "This is not work
+which can possibly be _popular_ in the wide sense; but it is work that
+will be read and treasured centuries hence by those who really care for
+poetry."  And he wrote to Thompson, "I assure you no conceivable
+reaction can wipe out or overlay such work as yours.  It is firm-based
+on the rock of absolute beauty; and this I say all the more confidently
+because it does not happen to appeal to my own speculative, or even my
+own literary, prejudices."  The most extravagant admirer of all, and
+the one who will probably turn out to have come nearer the mark than
+any of Francis Thompson's contemporaries, was Mr. J. L. Garvin, the
+well known English leader-writer in politics and literature.  "After
+the publication of his second volume," he wrote in the English
+_Bookman_, March 1897, "when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven'
+and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical
+sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the
+highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets.
+The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature.  The 'Hound of
+Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' are the second greatest; and there is no
+third.  In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic
+mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography....  Even with the
+greatest pages of 'Sister Songs' sounding in one's ears, one is
+sometimes tempted to think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's
+high-water mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import--if we do
+damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he
+thrusts the word upon us.  We do not think we forget any of the
+splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of
+Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we
+consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language.  It
+fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and
+dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the
+very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad music of humanity.  It
+is the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas a Kempis....  The
+regal air, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, Mr. Thompson
+has them all.  A rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
+has never been known to poetry.  To many this will seem the simple
+delirium of over-emphasis.  The writer signs for those others, nowise
+ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a
+living poet, Francis Thompson."
+
+We do not associate Mr. Arnold Bennett with any of the ideas in
+religion or literature which supplied impulse to Francis Thompson.  It
+is a surprise of the first magnitude to find him carried away into the
+rapture of prophecy by the "Sister Songs."  "I declare," he says in an
+article appearing in July, 1895, "that for three days after this book
+appeared I read nothing else.  I went about repeating snatches of
+it--snatches such as--
+
+  'The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
+  Moves all the labouring surges of the world.'
+
+My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer
+poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare.  Show me the
+divinest glories of Shelley and Keats, even of Tennyson, who wrote the
+'Lotus Eaters' and the songs in the 'Princess,' and I think I can match
+them all out of this one book, this little book that can be bought at
+an ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary prosaic crown.  I fear
+that in thus extolling Francis Thompson's work, I am grossly outraging
+the canons of criticism.  For the man is alive, he gets up of a morning
+like common mortals, not improbably he eats bacon for breakfast; and
+every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet must not be
+called great until he is dead or very old.  Well, please yourself what
+you think.  But, in time to come, don't say I didn't tell you."  A
+whole generation of men has passed away since these words appeared; but
+they do not seem to be so fantastic and whimsical now as they seemed to
+be then.
+
+[Illustration: I said to dawn: Be sudden  _Page 47_]
+
+It can scarcely be claimed that the prophecies of Meredith, Mr. Garvin,
+and Mr. Arnold Bennett were of the kind which ultimately assures the
+event.  The reading-world dipped curiously into the pages about which
+there was so much conflict of opinion; it was startled and bewildered
+by a novel and difficult form of verse; and finally it agreed with the
+majority of critics that it was mostly nonsense--too Catholic to be
+catholic.  The poems sold badly, the 'Hound of Heaven' faring best.  It
+is a common mark of genius to be ahead of its time.  Even Thompson's
+coreligionists were cold.  Indeed, it may be said they were the
+coldest.  If the general reading-public of the nineties suspected
+Thompson of being a Victorian reactionary of ultra-montane mould, the
+Catholic public feared him for his art.  It was a wild unfettered thing
+which took strange liberties with Catholic pieties and could not be
+trusted to run in divine grooves.  One can afford to extenuate the
+attitude of reserve.  It was a period when brilliant heterodoxies and
+flaunting decadence were in the air.  The fact is, that critics and
+public delivered Thompson over to the Catholics; and the Catholics
+would have nothing to do with him.  Canon Sheehan could write of
+Thompson in 1898:
+
+"Only two Catholics--literary Catholics--have noticed this surprising
+genius--Coventry Patmore and Wilfrid Meynell.  The vast bulk of our
+coreligionists have not even heard his name, although it is already
+bruited amongst the Immortals; and the great Catholic poet, for whose
+advent we have been straining our vision, has passed beneath our eyes,
+sung his immortal songs, and vanished."  This was written almost ten
+years before Thompson died, but after his resolve to write no more
+poetry.
+
+It is easily within the probabilities that, small as was Thompson's
+audience during his lifetime, it would have been still smaller but for
+the extraneous interest excited by the strange story of his life.  He
+was born on December 16, 1859, in Preston, Lancashire, whence he went
+at the age of eleven to Ushaw College, a Catholic boarding school for
+boys.  This is the college where Lafcadio Hearn received his education;
+he had left the school a year or two before young Thompson's arrival.
+Both boys were designed for the priesthood.  Hearn lost his faith then
+or shortly afterwards: Thompson's irregular habits of dreamy
+abstraction rendered him unfit for a sacerdotal career.  When he had
+completed his course at college, where he had distinguished himself in
+English composition and attained respectable standing in the classics,
+his father, a hard-working physician, entered the lad, now eighteen, as
+a student of medicine in Owen College, Manchester.  The Thompson family
+had moved from Preston to Ashton-under-Lyne, where proximity to
+Manchester made it possible for the young medical student to spend his
+nights at home.
+
+Francis was of the silent and secretive sort where he could not hope to
+find intelligent sympathy.  This, and some cloudy compromise with his
+sense of filial dutifulness, will perhaps explain why he passed six
+years as a student of medicine without any serious purpose of becoming
+a physician and without informing his father of his disinclination.
+Three examinations and three failures at intervals of a year were
+necessary to convince the father of the true state of affairs.  Stern
+measures were adopted; and, although the consequences were pitifully
+tragical, it is hard to blame the father of Francis.  How are we to
+discover the extraordinary seal in a case that requires special and
+extraordinary treatment?
+
+Francis was twenty-four years old with no more idea than a child's of
+how life is planned on practical lines of prosperity.  The senior
+Thompson thought it time for him to learn and issued orders to find
+employment of some remunerative kind.  Accordingly during the next two
+years Francis served indifferently for brief periods as a clerk in the
+shop of a maker of surgical instruments and as a canvasser of an
+encyclopedia.  Both experiments in the art of making a living were
+failures, increasing paternal dissatisfaction.  The desperate young man
+then enlisted in the army, and after a few weeks' of drilling was
+rejected on the score of physical weakness.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I knew how the clouds arise,
+  Spumed of the wild sea-snortings  _Page 51_]
+
+During these shiftless and unhappy years as a listless medical student
+and laggard apprentice the poet's chief solace was the public library
+of Manchester.  In his daily absences from home his misery suggested
+another solace of a sinister kind.  After a severe illness during his
+second year of medicine his mother, says his biographer, presented him
+with a copy of De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater."  It is
+incredible that a _helluo librorum_, like Thompson, should have reached
+the age of twenty without ever having read a book which is one of the
+first to attract every bright school-boy.  This would be particularly
+true of a school-boy who lived near Manchester, De Quincey's own town.
+But the evidence seems to be against probabilities.  Thompson succumbed
+completely to the influence of the great genius whose temper and
+circumstances of life were singularly like his own.  Experiments in
+laudanum were made and habits contracted which accentuated a natural
+unfitness to wrestle with the practical problems of getting on and
+rendered family intercourse drearier than ever.
+
+In 1885, when he was twenty-six years old, Francis decided to leave
+home.  After a week in Manchester he requested and received from his
+father the price of a railway ticket for London.  The trip to the vast
+and strange city must have been made with only the vaguest of plans for
+the future.  The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than
+to rid his father of his vexatious presence.  There were friends in
+London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly
+allowance from home.  But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man
+away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after
+a while came to be unclaimed.  The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge
+city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of
+their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him.  In a period
+extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of a
+vagrant in the streets and alleys.  He made one or two brave essays at
+regular work of the most commonplace character, but without success.
+The worn copies of Aeschylus and Blake in the pockets of this ragged
+and gaunt roustabout contained no useful hints for the difficulties of
+the peculiar situation; its harshness could be transmuted into
+temporary and blessed oblivion by a drug whenever the means for
+purchase could be acquired.  The Guildhall Library was much frequented
+until shabbiness was excluded by the policeman.  This outcast poet,
+approaching thirty years of age, was at various times a bootblack, a
+newsboy, a vendor of matches, a nocturnal denizen of wharves and
+lounger on the benches of city-parks.  His cough-racked frame was the
+exposed target of cold and rain and winds.  He became used to hunger.
+At one time a six-pence, for holding a horse, was his only earnings for
+a week.  It was while he was aimlessly roaming the streets one night
+almost delirious from starvation that a prosperous shoe-merchant,
+benevolently engaged in religious rescue-work, came across Thompson,
+and, struck by the incongruity of his gentle speech, induced him to
+accept employment in his shop.  But one cannot allow business to suffer
+on account of an inveterate blunderer, even though the blunderer wear
+wings and has endeared himself to the family.  Mr. McMaster, kindly
+Anglican lay-missionary, who deserves grateful remembrance for
+recognizing and temporarily helping merit under the most deceptive
+disguise, was obliged much against his inclination to dismiss Francis
+and to allow him to fall back into the pit of squalor and vagabondage.
+
+But the few months of reprieve had supplied Thompson with the impulse
+to write.  Shortly after he was dropped from the McMaster establishment
+Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, the editor of _Merry England_, a Catholic
+magazine, received the following letter: "_Feb. 23rd, '87_--Dear
+Sir,--In enclosing the accompanying article for your inspection, I must
+ask pardon for the soiled state of the manuscript.  It is due, not to
+slovenliness, but to the strange places and circumstances under which
+it has been written.  For me, no less than Parolles, the dirty nurse
+experience has something fouled.  I enclose stamped envelope for a
+reply, since I do not desire the return of the manuscript, regarding
+your judgment of its worthlessness as quite final.  I can hardly expect
+that where my prose fails my verse will succeed.  Nevertheless, on the
+principle of 'Yet will I try the last,' I have added a few specimens of
+it, with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest.
+Apologizing very sincerely for any intrusion on your valuable time, I
+remain yours with little hope,
+
+"Francis Thompson.
+
+"Kindly address your rejection to the Charing Cross Post Office."
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+  ..... smitten me to my knee;
+  I am defenceless utterly   _Page 55_]
+
+
+The unpromising aspect of the manuscript, thus introduced, was the
+occasion of editorial neglect for some months.  When at last Mr.
+Meynell gave it his attention he was electrified into action.  He wrote
+to the address given by Thompson.  The letter was returned from the
+dead-letter office after many days.  Then he published one of the poems
+mentioned in the letter, "The Passion of Mary," in the hope that the
+author would disclose his whereabouts.  The plan succeeded and brought
+a letter from Thompson with a new address.  Mr. Meynell tried to waylay
+him at the new address, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane, but with
+characteristic shiftlessness the poet forgot to call there for possible
+letters.  But the seller of drugs finally established communications
+between the editor and the poet, and one day, more than a year after
+Thompson's first literary venture had been sent, he visited the office
+of _Merry England_.  Mr. Everard Meynell, the poet's biographer, thus
+describes the entrance of the poet into his father's sanctum.  "My
+father was told that Mr. Thompson wished to see him.  'Show him up,' he
+said, and was left alone.  Then the door opened, and a strange hand was
+thrust in.  The door closed, but Thompson had not entered.  Again it
+opened, again it shut.  At the third attempt a waif of a man came in.
+No such figure had been looked for; more ragged and unkempt than the
+average beggar, with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken
+shoes, he found my father at a loss for words.  'You must have had
+access to many books when you wrote that essay,' was what he said.
+'That,' said Thompson, his shyness at once replaced by an acerbity that
+afterwards became one of the most familiar of his never-to-be-resented
+mannerisms, 'that is precisely where the essay fails.  I had no books
+by me at the time save Aeschylus and Blake.' There was little to be
+done for him at that interview save the extraction of a promise to call
+again.  He made none of the confidences characteristic of a man seeking
+sympathy and alms.  He was secretive and with no eagerness for plans
+for his benefit, and refused the offer of a small weekly sum that would
+enable him to sleep in a bed and sit at a table."
+
+By patience and delicately offered kindnesses Mr. and Mrs. Meynell at
+length won the difficult privilege of helping the shy, nervous,
+high-strung spirit wandering in pain, hunger and exile amid the
+indecencies of extreme penury in a great city.  They were helped by the
+friendly sympathy and care of Premonstratensian and Franciscan monks.
+Thompson had sounded, and become familiar with, the depths of social
+degradation in all its external aspects of sordidness.  The most
+extraordinary part of his singular experience is that he affords a
+striking instance of the triumph of soul and mind over beleaguering
+circumstance.  The nightmare of his environment failed to subdue him.
+He preserved his spiritual sensitiveness, and literary ideals of a most
+exalted kind, through the most depressing and demoralizing experiences.
+The following passage in that first essay offered to Mr. Meynell,
+entitled "Paganism: Old and New," a vindication of Christian over pagan
+ideals in art, shows the rich, colorful tone of mind of one who could
+walk unstained among the world's impurities.  "Bring back then, I say,
+in conclusion, even the best age of Paganism, and you smite beauty on
+the cheek.  But you _cannot_ bring back the best age of Paganism, the
+age when Paganism was a faith.  None will again behold Apollo in the
+forefront of the morning, or see Aphrodite in the upper air loose the
+long lustre of her golden locks.  But you _may_ bring back--_dii
+avertant omen_--the Paganism of the days of Pliny, and Statius, and
+Juvenal; of much philosophy, and little belief; of superb villas and
+superb taste; of banquets for the palate in the shape of cookery, and
+banquets for the eye in the shape of art; of poetry singing dead songs
+on dead themes with the most polished and artistic vocalisation; of
+everything most polished, from the manners to the marble floors; of
+vice carefully drained out of sight, and large fountains of virtue
+springing in the open air;--in one word, a most shining Paganism
+indeed--as putrescence also shines."  Unlike George Gissing and so many
+others who had to wade to celebrity through sloughs of bitter
+destitution, Francis Thompson felt no inclination to capitalize his
+expert knowledge of back streets and alleys for profit and the morbid
+entertainment of the curious.  His single failing in yielding to the
+attraction of an insidious drug seemed to be impotent to affect his
+high admirations and his clear perceptions in the regions of honor and
+religion.
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Yea, faileth now even dream
+  The dreamer  _Page 55_]
+
+It is surely one of the literary glories of a distinguished family that
+Mr. and Mrs. Meynell succeeded in helping Thompson to emancipate
+himself from the enslavement of a tyrannic habit.  His poetic genius
+began to flower in the new liberty.  For the next ten years interest in
+his poetry and literary friends and connections, few and select, made
+his life comparatively happy.  But he maintained a large measure of
+independence to the last.  That he was never ungrateful to those who
+befriended him, his poems are ample proof.  But in London he always had
+his own lodgings in a cheap but respectable quarter of the city.  His
+unpunctual and preoccupied manner sometimes created small distresses
+for his devoted friends to relieve.  During the last ten years of his
+life he wrote little poetry.  His vitality, never vigorous, was ebbing
+and unequal to the demands of inspired verse.  But during these years
+of decline he wrote much golden prose.  He was a regular and highly
+valued contributor to the _Academy_, the _Athenaeum_, the _Nation_, and
+the _Daily Chronicle_.  One can hardly fail to be impressed by the mere
+industry of a writer of reputed slack habits of work.  The published
+volume of his selected essays is literary criticism, as learned and
+allusive as Matthew Arnold's, and as nicely poised, with the advantage
+of being poised in more rarified heights than Arnold's wings could hope
+to scale.  In this book is his classic and most wonderful essay on
+Shelley, written before his strength began to flag, in which prose
+seems to be carried off its feet, as it were, in a very storm of poetic
+impulse.  The published essays are not a tithe of Thompson's writings
+for the press.  Moreover, we have a study of Blessed John de la Salle,
+a little volume on "Health and Holiness," and a large "Life of St.
+Ignatius Loyola," none of them suggesting even remotely the plantigrade
+writing of the mechanical hack.
+
+During the last year of his life, when consumption had almost
+completely undermined resistance, his old habit reasserted its empire.
+But it was not for long, and can hardly be said to have hastened the
+end, which came on November 13, 1907, in the Hospital of St. John and
+St. Elizabeth.  He was buried in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, and
+on his coffin were roses from George Meredith's garden, with the
+poet-novelist's message: "A true poet, one of the small band."
+
+The "Hound of Heaven" has been called the greatest ode in the English
+language.  Such was the contemporary verdict of some of the most
+respected critics of the time, and the conviction of its justness
+deepens with the passing of years.  Recall the writers of great odes,
+Milton, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Collins, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley,
+Coleridge,--the best they have done will not outstare the "Hound of
+Heaven."  Where shall we find its equal for exaltation of mood that
+knows no fatigue from the first word to the last?  The motion of
+angelic hosts must be like the movement of this ode, combining in some
+marvellous and mysterious way the swiftness of lightning with the
+stately progress of a pageant white with the blinding white light of an
+awful Presence.  The note of modernness is the quality which is most
+likely to mislead us in forecasting favorably the durability of
+contemporary poetry, appealing as it does to so many personal issues
+irrelevant to the standards of immortal art.  This is precisely the
+note which is least conspicuous in the "Hound of Heaven."  The poem
+might have been written in the days of Shakespeare, or, in a different
+speech, by Dante or Calderon.  The Rev. Francis P. LeBuffe, S. J., has
+written an interesting book on the "Hound of Heaven," pointing out the
+analogy between the poem and the psalms of David; and another Jesuit,
+the late Rev. J. F. X. O'Connor, in a published "Study" of the poem,
+says that in it Francis Thompson "seems to sing, in verse, the thought
+of St. Ignatius in the spiritual exercises,--the thought of St. Paul in
+the tender, insistent love of Christ for the soul, and the yearning of
+Christ for that soul which ever runs after creatures, till the love of
+Christ wakens in it a love of its God, which dims and deadens all love
+of creatures except through love for Him.  This was the love of St.
+Paul, of St. Ignatius, of St. Stanislaus, of St. Francis of Assist, of
+St. Clare, of St. Teresa."
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  The hid battlements of Eternity:
+  Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
+  Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again  _Page 56_]
+
+The neologisms and archaic words employed in the poem seem to be a
+legitimate and instinctive effort of the poet's inspiration to soar
+above the limitations of time and to liberate itself from the transient
+accretions of a living, and therefore constantly changing, mode of
+speech.  He strove after an enfranchisement of utterance, devoid of
+stratifying peculiarities, assignable to no age or epoch, and
+understood of all.  A soul-shaking thought, prevalent throughout
+Christendom, was felt imaginatively by a highly endowed poet, and, like
+impetuous volcanic fires that fling heavenward mighty fragments and
+boulders of mountain in their red release, found magnificent expression
+in elemental grandeurs of language, shot through with the wild lights
+of hidden flames and transcending all pettiness of calculated artifice
+and fugitive fashion.
+
+The dominating idea in the "Hound of Heaven" is so familiar, so--one
+might say--innate, that it is almost impudent to undertake to explain
+it.  Even in the cases of persons to whom the reading of poetry is an
+uncultivated and difficult art, there is an instantaneous leap of
+recognition as the thought emerges from the cloudy glories of the poem.
+Still, modern popular systems of philosophy are so dehumanizing in
+their tendencies, and so productive of what may be called secondary and
+artificially planted instincts, that it is perhaps not entirely useless
+to attempt to elucidate the obvious.
+
+"The heavens," says Hazlitt, "have gone farther off and become
+astronomical."  The home-like conception of the universe in mediaeval
+times, when dying was like going out of one room into another, and man
+entertained a neighborly feeling for the angels, has a tendency to
+disappear as science unfolds more and more new infinities of time and
+space, new infinities of worlds and forms of life.  The curious notion
+has crept in, that man must sink lower into insignificance with every
+new discovery of the vastness and huge design of creation.  God would
+seem to have over-reached Himself in disclosing His power and majesty,
+stunning and overwhelming the intellect and heart with the crushing
+weight of the evidences of His Infinity.  We have modern thinkers
+regarding Christian notions of the Godhead as impossible to a mind
+acquainted with the paralyzing revelations of scientific knowledge.
+The late John Fiske used to deride what he called the anthromorphism of
+the Christian idea of God, as of a venerable, white-bearded man.  And
+these philosophers deem it more reverent to deny any personal
+relationship between God and man for the reason that God is too great
+to be interested in man, and man too little to be an object of interest.
+
+Before indicating the essential error of this attitude, it is necessary
+to state, merely for the sake of historical accuracy, that the
+Christian conception of the Godhead, as expressed by St. Thomas
+Aquinas, Dante, Lessius, and a host of Christian writers, has never
+been approached in its sublime suggestions of Infinite and Eternal
+power and glory by any modern philosopher.  In the second and third
+Lectures of Cardinal Newman's, "Scope and Nature of University
+Education," there is an outline of the Christian teaching of the nature
+of God which, in painstaking accuracy of thought and sheer grandeur of
+conception, has no counterpart in modern literature.
+
+Let us always remember that telescope and microscope in all the range
+of their discoveries have not uncovered the existence of anything
+greater than man himself.  The most massive star of the Milky Way is
+not so wonderful as the smallest human child.  Moreover man's present
+entourage of illimitable space and countless circling suns and planets
+cannot be said to have cost an omnipotent God more trouble, so to
+speak, than a universe a million times smaller.  The prodigality of the
+Creator reveals His endless resources; if the vision of sidereal
+abysses and flaming globes intimidates me and makes me cynical about my
+unimportance, is it not because I have lost the high consciousness of a
+spiritual being and forgotten the unplumbed chasms which separate
+matter from mind?
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+  Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
+  Be dunged with rotten death?  _Page 57_]
+
+In Francis Thompson's Catholic philosophy, which must be partially
+understood if the reader is to get at the heart of the "Hound of
+Heaven," the tremendous manifestations of God's attributes of power
+prepare us to expect equally tremendous manifestations of His
+attributes of love.  The more prodigal God is discovered to be in
+lavish expenditures of omnipotence in the material universe, the more
+alert the soul becomes to look for and to detect overwhelming surprises
+of Divine Love.  Hence, to Thompson there was nothing irrational in the
+special revelation of God to man, in His Incarnation, His death on the
+cross, and His sacramental life in the Church.  The Divine energy of
+God's love, as displayed in the supernatural revelation of Himself,
+seems to be even vaster and more intense than the Divine energy of
+creation displayed in the revelation of nature.  Every new revelation
+of God's power and wisdom which science unfolds serves only to restore
+a balance in our mind between God's power and God's love.  The more
+astronomical the heavens become, the closer they bring God to us.
+
+Another conception of God to be kept in mind, if we are to grasp the
+meaning of the "Hound of Heaven," is the omniscient character, the
+infinite perfection, of God's knowledge.  God sees each of us as fully
+and completely as if there were no one else and nothing else to see
+except us.  Practically speaking, God gives each one of us His
+undivided attention.  And through this spacious channel of His Divine
+and exclusive attention pour the ocean-tides of His love.  The weak
+soul is afraid of the terrible excess of Divine Love.  It tries to
+elude it; but Love meets it at every cross-road and by-path, down which
+it would run and hide itself, and gently turns it back.
+
+Francis Thompson, in an interpretation of "A Narrow Vessel," has left
+us in prose a description of human weakness and wilfulness reluctant of
+its true bliss.  The following passage is an excellent commentary on
+the "Hound of Heaven." "Though God," he says, "asks of the soul but to
+love Him what it may, and is ready to give an increased love for a poor
+little, the soul feels that this infinite love demands naturally its
+whole self, that if it begin to love God it may not stop short of all
+it has to yield.  It is troubled, even if it did go a brief way, on the
+upward path; it fears and recoils from the whole great surrender, the
+constant effort beyond itself which is sensibly laid on it.  It falls
+back with relieved contentment on some human love, a love on its own
+plane, where somewhat short of total surrender may go to requital,
+where no upward effort is needful.  And it ends by giving for the
+meanest, the most unsufficing and half-hearted return, that utter
+self-surrender and self-effacement which it denied to God.  Even (how
+rarely) if the return be such as mortal may render, how empty and
+unsatiated it leaves the soul.  One always is less generous to love
+than the other."
+
+God walks morning, noon and eve in the garden of the soul, calling it
+to a happiness which affrights it.  And the timid and self-seeking soul
+strives to hide itself under the stars, under the clouds of heaven,
+under human love, under the distractions of work and pleasure and
+study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature,
+if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle
+accents of pursuivant Love.  But all things are in league with God, Who
+made and rules them.  They cannot conspire against Him.  They betray
+the refugee.  He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find
+the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly.  The Divine
+thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of
+Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature.
+Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love.  The
+"Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul
+into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.
+
+JAMES J. DALY, S. J.
+
+
+
+
+OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"
+
+Francis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of
+his mature life in London where he died in 1907.  He was educated at
+Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College,
+Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.
+
+But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the
+consulting-room.  He walked to London in search of a living, finding,
+indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at
+length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others,
+and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which
+endured for a half-decade of years--his "Poems," his "Sister Songs,"
+and his "New Poems."
+
+"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to
+Thomas a Kempis."  The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in
+its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic
+Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his
+"Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite
+another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.
+
+W. M.
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+When she lit her glimmering tapers . . . . . . . . .   _Frontispiece_
+
+Titanic glooms of chasmed fears
+
+Across the margent of the world I fled
+
+I said to dawn: Be sudden
+
+I knew how the clouds arise
+
+Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+
+Yea, faileth now even dream
+
+The hid battlements of Eternity
+
+Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+
+I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+
+Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside
+
+Thunder-driven, They clanged His chariot
+
+In her wind-walled palace
+
+I shook the pillaring hours
+
+And now my heart is as a broken fount
+
+That Voice is round me like a bursting sea
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+  Of my own mind]
+
+
+
+THE HOUND OF HEAVEN
+
+  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
+  I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
+  I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
+    Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
+  I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
+        Up vistaed hopes, I sped;
+        And shot, precipitated,
+  Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
+    From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
+        But with unhurrying chase,
+        And unperturbed pace,
+      Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+        They beat--and a Voice beat
+        More instant than the Feet--
+      "All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+        I pleaded, out law-wise,
+  By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
+    Trellised with intertwining charities
+  (For, though I knew His love Who followed,
+        Yet was I sore adread
+  Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside);
+  But, if one little casement parted wide,
+    The gust of His approach would clash it to.
+    Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
+  Across the margent of the world I fled,
+    And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
+    Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;
+        Fretted to dulcet jars
+  And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
+  I said to dawn: Be sudden; to eve: Be soon--
+    With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over
+        From this tremendous Lover!
+  Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!
+    I tempted all His servitors, but to find
+  My own betrayal in their constancy,
+  In faith to Him their fickleness to me,
+    Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.
+  To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;
+    Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.
+        But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,
+      The long savannahs of the blue;
+          Or whether, Thunder-driven,
+      They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven
+  Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet:--
+    Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.
+          Still with unhurrying chase,
+          And unperturbed pace,
+  Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+          Came on the following Feet,
+          And a Voice above their beat--
+  "Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me."
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  Thunder-driven,
+  They clanged His chariot 'thwart a heaven
+  Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o' their feet]
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+  I sought no more that after which I strayed
+      In face of man or maid;
+      But still within the little children's eyes
+    Seems something, something that replies,
+  _They_ at least are for me, surely for me!
+  I turned me to them very wistfully;
+  But just as their young eyes grew sudden fair
+      With dawning answers there,
+  Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.
+
+
+[Illustration: In her wind-walled palace]
+
+
+  Come then, ye other children,
+    Nature's--share
+    With me" (said I) "your delicate fellowship;
+    Let me greet you lip to lip,
+    Let me twine with you caresses,
+        Wantoning
+    With our Lady-Mother's vagrant tresses,
+        Banqueting
+    With her in her wind-walled palace,
+    Underneath her azured dais,
+    Quaffing, as your taintless way is,
+        From a chalice
+  Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."
+        So it was done;
+  _I_ in their delicate fellowship was one--
+  Drew the bolt of Nature's secrecies.
+        _I_ knew all the swift importings
+        On the wilful face of skies;
+        I knew how the clouds arise,
+        Spumed of the wild sea-snortings;
+          All that's born or dies
+      Rose and drooped with; made them shapers
+  Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine--
+        With them joyed and was bereaven.
+        I was heavy with the even,
+    When she lit her glimmering tapers
+      Round the day's dead sanctities.
+      I laughed in the morning's eyes.
+  I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
+      Heaven and I wept together,
+  And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;
+  Against the red throb of its sunset-heart
+          I laid my own to beat,
+          And share commingling heat;
+  But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.
+  In vain my tears were wet on Heaven's grey cheek.
+  For ah! we know not what each other says,
+        These things and I; in sound _I_ speak--
+  _Their_ sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.
+  Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake by drouth;
+        Let her, if she would owe me,
+  Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
+        The breasts o' her tenderness:
+  Never did any milk of hers once bless
+          My thirsting mouth.
+        Nigh and nigh draws the chase,
+          With unperturbed pace,
+        Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
+          And past those noised Feet
+          A Voice comes yet more fleet--
+        "Lo! naught contents thee, who content'st not Me."
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  I shook the pillaring hours
+  And pulled my life upon me]
+
+
+  Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
+  My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
+          And smitten me to my knee;
+          I am defenceless utterly.
+          I slept, methinks, and woke,
+  And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.
+  In the rash lustihead of my young powers,
+          I shook the pillaring hours
+  And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,
+  I stand amid the dust o' the mounded years--
+  My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.
+  My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,
+  Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.
+      Yea, faileth now even dream
+  The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;
+  Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist
+  I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,
+  Are yielding; cords of all too weak account
+  For earth, with heavy griefs so overplussed.
+        Ah! is Thy love indeed
+  A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed,
+  Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?
+          Ah! must--
+          Designer infinite!--
+  Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?
+  My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust;
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+          From the dank thoughts that shiver
+  Upon the sighful branches of my mind.
+          Such is; what is to be?
+  The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?
+  I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds;
+  Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds
+  From the hid battlements of Eternity:
+  Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then
+  Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again;
+          But not ere Him who summoneth
+          I first have seen, enwound
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+  From the dank thoughts that shiver
+  With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned;
+  His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.
+  Whether man's heart or life it be which yields
+          Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields
+          Be dunged with rotten death?
+
+
+[Illustration:
+
+  And now my heart is as a broken fount,
+  Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever
+  From the dank thoughts that shiver]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+  Now of that long pursuit
+  Comes on at hand the bruit;
+  That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:
+          "And is thy earth so marred,
+          Shattered in shard on shard?
+    Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!
+        Strange, piteous, futile thing,
+  Wherefore should any set thee love apart?
+  Seeing none but I makes much of naught" (He said),
+  "And human love needs human meriting:
+        How hast thou merited--
+  Of all man's clotted clay the dingiest clot?
+        Alack, thou knowest not
+  How little worthy of any love thou art!
+  Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,
+        Save Me, save only Me?
+  All which I took from thee I did but take,
+        Not for thy harms,
+  But just that thou might'st seek it in My arms.
+        All which thy child's mistake
+  Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
+        Rise, clasp My hand, and come."
+          Halts by me that footfall:
+          Is my gloom, after all,
+    Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?
+          "Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
+          I am He Whom thou seekest!
+  Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."
+
+
+
+[Illustration: That Voice is round me like a bursting sea]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Back end papers]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson
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