[39] Dr. Henry Head, F.R.S.
[40] It was not Angelica, but Mrs. Delany.
[41] An allusion to Lewis Morris's Songs Unsung.
[42] On this subject, and the derivation of portions of Ecclesiastes, he corresponded with Fr. Clarke. The contents of commonplace-books of a somewhat early period suggest a taste for many kindred themes. In one he has entered random "Varia on Magic," accounts of and comments on many heresies, suspicions of the Masons, and fears of a Divine Visitation upon the general wickedness in the shape of general war; with these are important notes on Creation Myths, the Chaldean Genesis, the Egyptian Crocodile, the Kabbalist Doctrine of the Pre-existence of Souls; some symbols connected with the Incarnation, the Lotus, the ritual of the funeral sacrifice, with transcriptions from the Book of Respirations, the Prayer to Ammon Ra, &c.; and The meaning of Easter, a cutting scored with his own excursions into the etymology of the word—from Ishtar, the Chaldæan goddess—"And Ishtar I take to be Ashak Tar (or Tur) the Lady of the Light of the Way." But at the turn of a few pages he is found enlarging and correcting. Still nearer his real concern are the notes on varieties of the Cross symbol.
[43] In a poem "The Schoolmaster for God," which Francis thought just not good enough to put into a volume, he represents Satan as scaling the walls of God's garth, stealing the seed, and giving it a clandestine growth, which grew to fruit that made men who ate it an-hungered for God. And in this poem Satan is named "that Robber from the North." Again, in one of the "Ecclesiastical Ballads," the Veteran of Heaven declares, "The Prince I drave forth held the Mount of the North."
[44] See F. T.'s poem "The Newer Eve," or "After Woman," with whom the world should rise instead of fall.
[45] Mr. Albert Cock in the Dublin Review.
[46] The ending of the "Orient Ode" seems, in the frank exultation of its creed, to be unveiled and native pronouncement, as loud in its faith as the last line of Patmore's "Faint yet Pursuing," where he ends by "hearing the winds their Maker magnify."
[47] "The sun is the type of Christ, giving life with its proper blood to the earth," is Mr. Edmund Gardner's concise statement of F. T.'s meaning.
[48] F. T. had a theory of the solar existence that did not stop short, with Science, at the measurement of gases and their density. "It has," Mr. Ghosh tells me he said, "a life of its own, analogous to the life of the heart, periodic in its manifestations and—," but here Francis stopped. "To Western ears it will sound ridiculous," he said, and was silent. In vain Mr. Sarath Kumar Ghosh asserted his own Eastern aptitude for such speculation. Francis grimly repeated his excommunication, and Mr. Ghosh, conscious of a frock-coat and a great command of the English idiom, was half-convinced of its stness.