the seas of passion, as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with
the salt tides.... For, from a sensitive correspondence with
environment our race has passed into another stage; it is marked now
by a passionate desire for the mastery of life--a desire,
spiritualized in the highest lives, materialized in the lowest, so to
mould environment that the lives to come may be shaped to our will. It
is this which accounts for the curious likeness in our today with that
of the Elizabethans."

As Henley was an Elizabethan, so his brilliant contemporary, Francis
Thompson, was a "metaphysical," a man of the seventeenth century. Like
Emerson, he is closer in both form and spirit to the mystical poets
that followed the age of Shakespeare than he is to any other group or
school. One has only to read Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan to recognize
the kinship. Like these three men of genius, Thompson was not only
profoundly spiritual--he was aflame with religious passion. He was
exalted in a mystical ecstasy, all a wonder and a wild desire. He was
an inspired poet, careless of method, careless of form, careless of
thought-sequences. The zeal for God's house had eaten him up. His
poetry is like the burning bush, revealing God in the fire. His
strange figures of speech, the molten metal of his language, the
sincerity of his faith, have given to his poems a persuasive influence
which is beginning to be felt far and wide, and which, I believe, will
never die. One critic complains that the young men of Oxford and
Cambridge have forsaken Tennyson, and now read only Francis Thompson.
He need not be alarmed; these young men will all come back to
Tennyson, for sooner or later, everybody comes back to Tennyson. It is
rather a matter of joy that Thompson's religious poetry can make the
hearts of young men burn within them. Young men are right in hating
conventional, empty phrases, words that have lost all hitting power,