under the distractions of work and pleasure and
study, offers itself as a wistful servitor to child and man and nature,
if they will but afford it a refuge from the persistent and gentle
accents of pursuivant Love. But all things are in league with God, Who
made and rules them. They cannot conspire against Him. They betray
the refugee. He turns in abject surrender, and is astonished to find
the rest and happiness that he quested for so wildly. The Divine
thwartings which had harassed the soul become a tender mystery of
Infinite Love forcing itself upon an unworthy and unwilling creature.
Someone has said that every life is a romance of Divine Love. The
"Hound of Heaven" is a version of that romance which smites the soul
into an humble mood of acknowledgment and penitence.

JAMES J. DALY, S. J.

OF "THE HOUND OF HEAVEN"

Francis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of
his mature life in London where he died in 1907. He was educated at
Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College,
Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.

But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the
consulting-room. He walked to London in search of a living, finding,
indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at
length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others,
and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which
endured for a half-decade of years--his "Poems," his "Sister Songs,"
and his "New Poems."

"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to
Thomas a Kempis." The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in
its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic
Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his
"Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite
another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.

W. M.

[Illustration]

ILLUSTRATIONS

When she lit her glimmering tapers . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

Titanic glooms of chasmed fears

Across the margent of the world I fled

I said to dawn: Be sudden

I knew how the clouds arise

Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!

Yea, faileth now even dream

The hid battlements of Eternity

Whether man's heart or life it be which yields

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside

Thunder-driven, They clanged His chariot