s served indifferently for brief periods as a clerk in the
shop of a maker of surgical instruments and as a canvasser of an
encyclopedia. Both experiments in the art of making a living were
failures, increasing paternal dissatisfaction. The desperate young man
then enlisted in the army, and after a few weeks' of drilling was
rejected on the score of physical weakness.

[Illustration:

I knew how the clouds arise,
Spumed of the wild sea-snortings _Page 51_]

During these shiftless and unhappy years as a listless medical student
and laggard apprentice the poet's chief solace was the public library
of Manchester. In his daily absences from home his misery suggested
another solace of a sinister kind. After a severe illness during his
second year of medicine his mother, says his biographer, presented him
with a copy of De Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium Eater." It is
incredible that a _helluo librorum_, like Thompson, should have reached
the age of twenty without ever having read a book which is one of the
first to attract every bright school-boy. This would be particularly
true of a school-boy who lived near Manchester, De Quincey's own town.
But the evidence seems to be against probabilities. Thompson succumbed
completely to the influence of the great genius whose temper and
circumstances of life were singularly like his own. Experiments in
laudanum were made and habits contracted which accentuated a natural
unfitness to wrestle with the practical problems of getting on and
rendered family intercourse drearier than ever.

In 1885, when he was twenty-six years old, Francis decided to leave
home. After a week in Manchester he requested and received from his
father the price of a railway ticket for London. The trip to the vast
and strange city must have been made with only the vaguest of plans for
the future. The despairing youth seemed to have no other purpose than
to rid his father of his vexatious presence. There were friends in
London, on one of whom Francis was directed to call for a weekly
allowance from home. But a temperamental reluctance kept the young man
away from those who could help him, and even the weekly allowance after
a while came to be unclaimed. The rough, cyclonic forces of the huge
city caught this helpless child of a man's years in the full swing of
their blind sweep and played sad tricks with him. In a period
extending over nearly three years Francis Thompson led the life of