Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven is for many reasons a fitting close and climax to these studies.  He is as much akin to Shelley and Swinburne as Mr. Chesterton is akin to Mr. Bernard Shaw.  From them he has gathered not a little of his style and diction.  He is with them, too, in his passionate love of beauty, without which no idealist can possibly be a fair judge of paganism.  “With many,” he tells us in that Essay on Shelley which Mr. Wyndham pronounces the most important contribution to English letters during the last twenty years—­“with many the religion of beauty must always be a passion and a power, and it is only evil when divorced from the worship of the Primal Beauty.”  In this confession we are brought back to the point where we began.  The gods of Greece were ideals of earthly beauty, and by them, while their worship remained spiritual, men were exalted far above paganism.  And now, as we are drawing to a close, it is fitting that we should again remind ourselves that religious idealism must recover “the Christ beautiful,” if it is to retain its hold upon humanity.  In this respect, religion has greatly and disastrously failed, and he who can redeem that failure for us will indeed be a benefactor to his race.  Religion should lead us not merely to inquire in God’s holy place, but to behold the beauty of the Lord; and to behold it in all places of the earth until they become holy places for us.  Christ, the Man of Sorrows, has taught the world that wild joy of which Mr. Chesterton speaks such exciting things.  It remains for Thompson to remind us that he whose visage was more marred than any man yet holds that secret of surpassing beauty after which the poets’ hearts are seeking so wistfully.

Besides all this, we shall find here something which has not as yet been hinted at in our long quest.  The sound of the age-long battle dies away.  Here is a man who does not fight for any flag, but simply tells us the mysterious story of his own soul and ours.  It is a quiet and a fitting close for our long tale of excursions and alarums.  But into the quiet ending there enters a very wonderful and exciting new element.  We have been watching successive men following after the ideal, which, like some receding star, travelled before its pilgrims through the night.  Here the ideal is no longer passive, a thing to be pursued.  It halts for its pilgrims—­“the star which chose to stoop and stay for us.”  Nay, more, it turns upon them and pursues them.  The ideal is alive and aware—­a real and living force among the great forces of the universe.  It is out after men, and in this great poem we are to watch it hunting a soul down.  The whole process of idealism is now suddenly reversed, and the would-be captors of celestial beauty are become its captives.

As has been already stated, we must be in sympathetic understanding with the pagan heart in order to be of any account as advocates of idealism.  No reader of Thompson’s poetry can doubt for a moment his fitness here.  From the days of Pindar there has been a brilliant succession of singers and worshippers of the sun, culminating in the matchless song of Shelley.  In Francis Thompson’s poems of the sun, the succession is taken up again in a fashion which is not unworthy of the splendours of paganism at its very highest.