Yet for Francis Thompson all this glory of the sun is but a symbol. The
world where his spirit dwells is beyond the sun, and in nature it
displays itself to man but brokenly. In the bloody fires of sunset, in
the exquisite white artistry of the snow-flake, this supernatural
world is but showing us a few of its miracles, by which the miracles of
Christian faith are daily and hourly matched for sheer wonder and
beauty. The idealist claims as his inheritance all those things in which
the pagan finds his gods, and views them as the revelations of the
Master Spirit.
It is difficult to write about Thompson's poetry without writing mainly
about himself. In _The Hound of Heaven_, as in much else that he has
written, there is abundance of his own experience, and indeed his poems
often remind us of the sorrows of Teufelsdroeckh. That, however, is not
the purpose of this lecture; and, beyond a few notes of a general kind,
we shall leave him to reveal himself. Except for Mr. Meynell's
illuminative and all too short introduction to his volume of _Thompson's
Selected Poems_, there are as yet only scattered articles in magazines
to tell his strange and most pathetic story.
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