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156 selves to be. To point out that the human aspiration for supernal beauty, which Edgar Poe once defined as the essence of the poetic principle, was supremely potent in both men is merely saying that both were authentic poets. The further resemblance would seem to lie in that mystical and spiritual attitude toward life, in that fervour of imagination coupled with devotional tenderness (a "divine familiarity" Thompson himself once called it in commenting on the older poet) which may almost be claimed as a birthright by our Catholic songsters. But Crashaw's was essentially a lyric genius; and Francis Thompson is as dramatic as Browning. Temperamental contrasts are quite as striking: for while the voice of Richard Crashaw comes to us in tones of angelic sweetness, soaring ever to the clouds as to its native sphere, the author of the "Hound of Heaven" has pierced to the depths of passional experiences, and speaks in "words accursed of comfortable men." The one might well be called the poet of Bethlehem—the other, of Gethsemane!

Obvious enough, for the most part, are the imperfections of Thompson's poetic work. But his was overwhelmingly a creative genius, and his faults are, almost without exception, those secondary ones of criticism. He is prone to ellipse and obscurity, to a magnificent anarchy of construction: more than once will his robust and esoteric choice of words plunge the reader in semi-helplessness. Drawbacks such as these may seem superficial enough (and therefore the more unnecessary), but they have their root in some fundamental idiosyncrasy of thought, and are very rarely overcome. In a searching critique upon the first poems, Coventry Patmore granted Thompson all the masculine virtues of "profound thought and far-fetched splendour of imagery, and