His “Divine intoxication,” his certainty of the presence of God, is the more remarkable when it is realised through what depths of want and degradation and suffering Thompson passed, and what his life was for many years.  His father, a north-country doctor, wished him to follow the profession of medicine, but the son could not bear it, and so he ran away from home with—­for sole wealth—­a Blake in one pocket and an Aeschylus in the other.  In his struggle for life in London, fragile in body and sensitive in soul, he sank lower and lower, from selling boots to errand-boy, and finally for five years living as a vagabond without home or shelter, picking up a few pence by day, selling matches or fetching cabs, and sleeping under the archways of Covent Garden Market at night.  At last, in the very depth of his misery, he was sought out and rescued by the editor of the paper to whom he had sent Health and Holiness and some of his poems.  This saved him, his work brought him good friends, and he was enabled to write his wonderful poetry.  These terrible experiences, which would have quenched the faith of the ordinary man and led him to despair, with the poet mystic sought expression in those six triumphant verses found among his papers when he died,[82] verses charged with mystic passion, which assert the solid reality of spiritual things, and tell us that to the outcast and the wanderer every place was holy ground, Charing Cross was the gate of heaven, and that he beheld—­

    Christ walking on the water
    Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Through all that he writes there breathes the spirit of mystic devotion and aspiration, but the following characteristics and beliefs may be specially noted.

(1) His reverence of childhood.  He sees in the child something of the divinity which Vaughan and Wordsworth saw, and his poems to children, such as Daisy and The Poppy, have a special quality of passionate worship all their own.

(2) His attitude towards the beauty of woman.  This is entirely mystical, and is akin to the view of Plato and of Donne.  He shares their belief that love is but the power to catch sight of the beauty of the soul, which shines through and actually moulds the beauty of face and body.

    How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,
    Who cannot see her countenance for her soul,
    As birds see not the casement for the sky? 
    And, as ’tis check they prove its presence by,
    I know not of her body till I find
    My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.

    Her Portrait.

(3) His attraction towards the continual change and renewal of nature, not only of the movement of life to death, but of death to life.  He broods over the changing cycles of the year, winter and spring, decay and re-birth, and he sees in them a profound and far-reaching symbolism.  This is magnificently expressed in the Ode to the Setting Sun, where he paints a picture, unmatched in English verse, of the sun sinking to rest amid the splendours gathered round him in his fall.  The poem is charged with mystic symbolism, the main thought of which is that human life, ending apparently in death, is but the prelude of preparation for a more glorious day of spiritual re-birth.