whose charm or homeliness the soul would fain
hide itself from the spiritual pursuit. And the Great Huntsman is
remorseless in his determination to win the soul for the very best of
all. The soul longs for beauty, for interest, for comfort; and in the
beautiful, various, comfortable life of the earth she finds them. The
inner voice still tells of a nobler heritage; but she understands and
loves these earthly things, and would fain linger among them, shy of the
further flight.

The whole conception of the poem is the counterpart of Browning's
_Easter Day_, where the soul chooses and is allowed to choose the same
regions of the lesser good and beauty for its home. In that poem the
soul is permitted to devote itself for ever to the finest things that
earth can give--life, literature, scientific knowledge, love. The
permission sends it wild with joy, and having chosen, it settles down
for ever to the earth-bound life. But eternity is too long for the earth
and all that is upon it. It wears time out, and all the desire of our
mortality ages and grows weary. The spirit, made for immortal thoughts
and loves and life, finds itself the ghastly prisoner of that which is
inevitably decaying; but its immortality postpones the decent and
appropriate end to an eternal mockery and doom. At last, in the
tremendous close, it wakens to the unspeakable blessedness of _not_
being satisfied with anything that earth can give, and so proves itself
adequate for its own inheritance of immortality. In Thompson's poem the
soul is never allowed, even in dream, to rest in lower things until
satiety brings disillusion. The higher destiny is swift at her heels;
and ever, just as she would nestle in some new covert, she is torn from
it by the imperious Best of All that claims her for its own.

There is no obvious sequence of the phases of the poem, nor any logical
order connecting them into a unity of experience. They may or may not be
a rescript of Thompson's own inner life, but every detail might be
placed in another order without the slightest loss to the meaning or the
truth. The only guiding and unifying element is a purely artistic
one--that of the Hound in full cry, and the unity of the poem is but
that of a day's hunting. One would like to know what remote origin it is
to which we owe the figure. Thompson was a Greek scholar, and some such
legend as that of Actaeon may well have been in his mind. But the chase
of dogs was a common horror in