When a certain slender volume of Poems, by one Francis Thompson, was issued in the November of 1893, critical London opened wide eyes of attention and even astonishment. It was not, of course, the mere fact of a new luminary upon the poetic horizon—too frequent an occurrence to cause much excitement, and prone, alas, to prove but the giddy flight of a star shooting down to oblivion. But in these pages there was manifestly something unusual—something elemental and arresting. Their author was straightway greeted with the dubious distinction of new poet, and every variety of criticism was showered upon his work. The old, old cry of "native woodnotes wild" came from one reviewer, from another the complaint of too much polishing; his diction was decried as illiterate on one side and as "too literate" on the other. As a whole, however, the verdict was one of rather dazed appreciation; and, if personal details of a more or less romantic nature began to mingle with current criticism, they merely, and for a time, added to the poet's little vogue.
But who was the poet? In one sense a young man—some thirty-four years—as ages go: but bowed already, bent, well-nigh broken by the age-old sorrow of the world. Not unmeet was it that Thompson's birth should have been in Lancashire, historic home of the flame-red, blood-red rose. His father and mother were converts to the Faith. He was early sent to the venerable Ushaw school, in half-anticipation of a priestly career. Later came the tragic choice of medicine (his family's choice, for the father was a physician) and the passing on to Owens College, Manchester. But Francis loved the public libraries too well to keep to his Materia Medica; and he would seem to have lacked courage to tell his father how radically, how painfully, how even ludicrously
