kled, Mother, I at last
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,
Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off
The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun,
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.

But those last lines:

And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.

we cannot compare with any model. They stand by themselves,
unsurpassable, lines such as are only to be found here and there even
in the great poets.

The more one reads this poetry of Thompson's the more one discovers
that it is something essentially individual. Harmonies that one may
miss on a first reading become more apparent and more insistent as one
reads again, and the exquisite, haunting melody of his verse pursues
us, and its faultless, rich rhythms seem to create new patterns of
form. One may miss not a little of his thought, because the engrossing
beauty of the language lays hold of the senses. In almost every poem
one finds some lingering phrase:

Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.

Or:

The little sweetness making grief complete.

Often he shows that exact sense of lyrical fitness which Milton
pre-eminently possessed, and, second only to him, Shelley. We see it
in the passage which begins:

Suffer me at your leafy feast
To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest,
And watch your mirth,
Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth.

_The Hound of Heaven_, I think, has rightly been pronounced his
greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of
imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest
depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of
his mind's flight. But next to that I would put _The Making of Viola_,
a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his sister Christina, could
have written:

I

_The Father of Heaven._
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Twirl your wheel with silver din;
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Spin a tress for Viola.

_Angels._
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola!

II

_The Father of Heaven._
Weave, hands angelical,
Weave a woof of flesh to pall
Weave, hands evangelical--