His style and choice of words are an achievement in themselves, as distinctive as those of Thomas Carlyle.  They, and the attitude of mind with which they are congruous, have already set a fashion in our poetry, and some of its results are excellent.  In Rose and Vine, and in other poems of Mrs. Rachel Annand Taylor, we have the same blend of power and beauty, the same wildness in the use of words, and the same languor and strangeness as if we had entered some foreign and wonderfully coloured world.  In Ignatius the style and diction are quite simple, ordinary, and straightforward, but that biography is decidedly the least effective of his works.  It would seem that here as elsewhere among really great writings the style is the natural and necessary expression of the individual mind and imagination.  The Life of Shelley, which is certainly one of the masterpieces of English prose, has found for its expression a style quite unique and distinctive, in which there are constant reminders of other stylists, yet no imitation of any.  The poetry is drugged, and as we read his poems through in the order of their publication, we feel the power of the poppy more and more.  At last the hand seems to lose its power and the will its control, though in flashes of sheer flame the imagination shows wild and beautiful as ever.  His gorgeousness is beyond that of the Orient.  The eccentric and arresting words that constantly amaze the ear, bring with them a sense of things occult yet dazzling, as if we were assisting at some mystic rite, in a ritual which demanded language choice and strange.

Something of this may be due to narcotics, and to the depressing tragedy of his life.  More of it is due to Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne.  But these do not explain the style, nor the thoughts which clothed themselves in it.  Both style and thoughts are native to the man.  What he borrows he first makes his own, and thus establishes his right to borrow—­a right very rarely to be conceded.  Much that he has learned from Shelley he passes on to his readers, but before they receive it, it has become, not Shelley’s, but Francis Thompson’s.  To stick a lotos-flower in our buttonhole—­harris-cloth or broadcloth, it does not matter—­is an impertinent folly that makes a guy of the wearer.  But this man’s raiment is his own, not that of other men, and Shelley himself would willingly have put his own flowers there.

Those who stumble at the prodigality and licence of his style, and the unchartered daring of his imagination, will find a most curious and brilliant discussion of the whole subject in his Essay on Shelley, which may be summed up in the injunction that “in poetry, as in the Kingdom of God, we should not take thought too greatly wherewith we shall be clothed, but seek first—­seek first, not seek only—­the spirit, and all these things will be added unto us.”  He discusses his own style with an unexpected frankness.  His view