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Rh Of formally devotional poetry Francis Thompson has written little—"Ex Ore Infantium," the soaring, surging lines of "Assumpta Maria," and a few others. Yet through all his work the spiritual element is the one commanding, indubitable thing. And religion is more than an emotion to him: it is a philosophy. The mystery of pain and evil one finds acknowledged, not lightly, but through cataclysmic rending of the spirit; and a thousandfold more convincing, because of this wide-eyed out-look upon Life, is the poet's ultimate and persistent hold upon Faith. "If hate were none," he has somewhere dared to ask:

Throughout the mystical poems which form, then, so large a proportion of Thompson's work, there burns a most poignant message. It is the old, primal story of God and the soul, and one finds it thrilling with never-to-be-forgotten intensity in that magnificent ode, "The Hound of Heaven."