of the use of imagination is expressed in the suggestive and extraordinary words—­“To sport with the tangles of Neaera’s hair may be trivial idleness or caressing tenderness, exactly as your relation to Neraea is that of heartless gallantry or of love.  So you may toy with imagery in mere intellectual ingenuity, and then you might as well go write acrostics; or you may toy with it in raptures, and then you may write a Sensitive Plant.”  If a man is passionate, and passion is choosing her own language in his work, he may be forgiven much.  If he chooses strange words deliberately and in cold blood, there is no reason why we should forgive him anything.

So much has been necessary as an introduction, but our subject is neither the man Francis Thompson nor his poetry in general, but the one poem which is at once the most characteristic expression of his personality and of his poetic genius. The Hound of Heaven has for its idea the chase of man by the celestial huntsman.  God is out after the soul, pursuing it up and down the universe.  God,—­but God incarnate in Jesus Christ, whose love and death are here the embodiment and revelation of the whole ideal world.  The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee from the Highest, and seeks refuge in every possible form of earthly experience—­at least in every clean and noble form, for there is nothing suggestive of low covert or the mire.  It is simply the second-best as a refuge from the best that is depicted here—­the earth at its pagan finest, in whose charm or homeliness the soul would fain hide itself from the spiritual pursuit.  And the Great Huntsman is remorseless in his determination to win the soul for the very best of all.  The soul longs for beauty, for interest, for comfort; and in the beautiful, various, comfortable life of the earth she finds them.  The inner voice still tells of a nobler heritage; but she understands and loves these earthly things, and would fain linger among them, shy of the further flight.

The whole conception of the poem is the counterpart of Browning’s Easter Day, where the soul chooses and is allowed to choose the same regions of the lesser good and beauty for its home.  In that poem the soul is permitted to devote itself for ever to the finest things that earth can give—­life, literature, scientific knowledge, love.  The permission sends it wild with joy, and having chosen, it settles down for ever to the earth-bound life.  But eternity is too long for the earth and all that is upon it.  It wears time out, and all the desire of our mortality ages and grows weary.  The spirit, made for immortal thoughts and loves and life, finds itself the ghastly prisoner of that which is inevitably decaying; but its immortality postpones the decent and appropriate end to an eternal mockery and doom.  At last, in the tremendous close, it wakens to the unspeakable blessedness of not being satisfied with anything that earth can give, and so proves itself adequate for its own inheritance of immortality.  In Thompson’s poem the soul is never allowed, even in dream, to rest in lower things until satiety brings disillusion.  The higher destiny is swift at her heels; and ever, just as she would nestle in some new covert, she is torn from it by the imperious Best of All that claims her for its own.