And did Love live, not even Love could sing.
And Lady, thus I dare to say,
Not all with you is passed away!
·······
Beyond your star, still, still the stars are bright;
Beyond your highness, still I follow height;
Sole I go forth, yet still to my sad view,
Beyond your trueness, Lady, Truth stands true.
In different vein, but full of charm and of a gracious seeming-ingenuousness, is the "little dramatic sequence" which our poet has comprehended under the title "A Narrow Vessel." There is magic in his "Love Declared," that moment singled out, set apart in the heart's long consciousness, when
the winds
Caught up their breathing, and the world's great pulse
Stayed in mid-throb, and the wild train of life
Reeled by, and left us stranded on a hush.
It is all so naïvely intimate that almost as a shock comes the Patmorean revelation of the Epilogue, wherein it appears that this very, very human story is but an allegory of something more divine, since
She, that but giving part, not whole,
Took even the part back, is the Soul.
"The human heart," declared Walter Savage Landor, "is the world of poetry; the imagination is only its atmosphere." Never a poet understood this better than Thompson. While removed by the length of the cosmos from the mists of pantheism (in which, by inevitable paradox, personality tends ever to become impersonal!) Thompson beheld in Nature a wondrously vital and sentient thing. Beyond this, he had the
