t he has learned
from Shelley he passes on to his readers, but before they receive it, it
has become, not Shelley's, but Francis Thompson's. To stick a
lotos-flower in our buttonhole--harris-cloth or broadcloth, it does not
matter--is an impertinent folly that makes a guy of the wearer. But this
man's raiment is his own, not that of other men, and Shelley himself
would willingly have put his own flowers there.

Those who stumble at the prodigality and licence of his style, and the
unchartered daring of his imagination, will find a most curious and
brilliant discussion of the whole subject in his _Essay on Shelley_,
which may be summed up in the injunction that "in poetry, as in the
Kingdom of God, we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we
shall be clothed, but seek first--seek _first_, not seek _only_--the
spirit, and all these things will be added unto us." He discusses his
own style with an unexpected frankness. His view of the use of
imagination is expressed in the suggestive and extraordinary words--"To
sport with the tangles of Neaera's hair may be trivial idleness or
caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neraea is that of
heartless gallantry or of love. So you may toy with imagery in mere
intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics;
or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a _Sensitive
Plant_." If a man is passionate, and passion is choosing her own
language in his work, he may be forgiven much. If he chooses strange
words deliberately and in cold blood, there is no reason why we should
forgive him anything.

So much has been necessary as an introduction, but our subject is
neither the man Francis Thompson nor his poetry in general, but the one
poem which is at once the most characteristic expression of his
personality and of his poetic genius. _The Hound of Heaven_ has for its
idea the chase of man by the celestial huntsman. God is out after the
soul, pursuing it up and down the universe. God,--but God incarnate in
Jesus Christ, whose love and death are here the embodiment and
revelation of the whole ideal world. The hunted one flees, as men so
constantly flee from the Highest, and seeks refuge in every possible
form of earthly experience--at least in every clean and noble form, for
there is nothing suggestive of low covert or the mire. It is simply the
second-best as a refuge from the best that is depicted here--the earth
at its pagan finest, in