Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 146.jpg

146 friends could recapture the splendid victory of that early renaissance, nor win back health to his own poor life.

It was on the 13th of November, 1907, that Francis Thompson died: shortly after a visit once again to his peaceful Sussex, at the home of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt. He died in the London to which, rather than to the country, he seemed to belong, and just as dawn was breaking in the east. He left behind him a number of unpublished poems, alike early and late, to be gathered by his literary executor in the collected edition of his work.

Well—one may see Thompson's achievement as a whole now, and through a perspective of time which, naturally, changes some details of the outlook. What does not change or anywise diminish is the conviction of his high place as poet. His work is passionately personal; for all the debt to Patmorean philosophy, its form and its thought are overwhelmingly his own. But it has added many a "heart-remembered" line to the legitimate heritage of English literature. This subjective colouring, as omnipresent in the lyric of childhood as in the Nature ode, is nowhere more emphatic than throughout the "Love in Dian's Lap," addressed to Mrs. Meynell. Nor, indeed, is there any division of Thompson's poetic work more uniquely exquisite. These poems are, for the most part, a record of one of those high and beautiful friendships which literature has again and again immortalised for us.