have been spoken by one of Bernard Shaw's modern heroes to one of his
modern heroines. The curt, bleak words, the haughty, heathen spirit are
certainly as remote as anything can be from the luxuriant humility of
Francis Thompson.

If the writers have a real point of union it is in a certain instinct
for contrast between their shape and subject matter. All the poems are
brief in form, and at the same time big in topic. They remind us of the
vivid illuminations of the virile thirteenth century, when artists
crowded cosmic catastrophes into the corner of an initial letter; where
one may find a small picture of the Deluge or of the flaming Cities of
the Plain. One of the specially short poems sees the universe overthrown
and the good angels conquered. Another short poem sees the newsboys in
Fleet Street shouting the news of the end of the world, and the awful
return of God. The writers seem unconsciously to have sought to make a
poem as large as a revelation, while it was nearly as short as a riddle.
And though Francis Thompson himself was rather in the Elizabethan
tradition of amplitude and ingenuity, he could write separate lines that
were separate poems in themselves:--

"And thou, what needest with thy tribe's black tents,
Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?"

A mediaeval illuminator would have jumped out of his sandals in his
eagerness to illustrate that.

G.K. CHESTERTON.