's contemporaries, was Mr. J. L. Garvin, the
well known English leader-writer in politics and literature. "After
the publication of his second volume," he wrote in the English
_Bookman_, March 1897, "when it became clear that the 'Hound of Heaven'
and 'Sister Songs' should be read together as a strict lyrical
sequence, there was no longer any comparison possible except the
highest, the inevitable comparison with even Shakespeare's Sonnets.
The Sonnets are the greatest soliloquy in literature. The 'Hound of
Heaven' and 'Sister Songs' are the second greatest; and there is no
third. In each case it is rather consciousness imaged in the magic
mirror of poetry than explicit autobiography.... Even with the
greatest pages of 'Sister Songs' sounding in one's ears, one is
sometimes tempted to think the 'Hound of Heaven' Mr. Thompson's
high-water mark for unimaginable beauty and tremendous import--if we do
damnably iterate Mr. Thompson's tremendousness, we cannot help it, he
thrusts the word upon us. We do not think we forget any of the
splendid things of an English anthology when we say that the 'Hound of
Heaven' seems to us, on the whole, the most wonderful lyric (if we
consider 'Sister Songs' as a sequence of lyrics) in the language. It
fingers all the stops of the spirit, and we hear now a thrilling and
dolorous note of doom and now the quiring of the spheres and now the
very pipes of Pan, but under all the still sad music of humanity. It
is the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas a Kempis.... The
regal air, the prophetic ardors, the apocalyptic vision, Mr. Thompson
has them all. A rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius
has never been known to poetry. To many this will seem the simple
delirium of over-emphasis. The writer signs for those others, nowise
ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's very Sonnets the poetry of a
living poet, Francis Thompson."

We do not associate Mr. Arnold Bennett with any of the ideas in
religion or literature which supplied impulse to Francis Thompson. It
is a surprise of the first magnitude to find him carried away into the
rapture of prophecy by the "Sister Songs." "I declare," he says in an
article appearing in July, 1895, "that for three days after this book
appeared I read nothing else. I went about repeating snatches of
it--snatches such as--

'The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world.'

My belief