sh innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else
should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with
understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for
recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least
commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is
but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of
the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at
home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall
Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding
and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the
throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their
morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that
loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from
hunger and weakness.

Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we
should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece
what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with
climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing
cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they
were words instead of drops.

It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall
have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not
interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the
highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon
him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive
words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from
another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets
of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of
sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like
Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.

Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in
radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His
diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his
glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him
forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to
remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our
highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he
is f