"Dear Mr. Meynell,—I leave with this on the mantel-piece (in an exercise-book) the poem of which I spoke. If intensity of labour could make it good, good it would be. One way or the other, it will be an effectual test of a theme on which I have never yet written; if from it I have failed to draw poetry, then I may as well take down my sign.—Always yours,
Francis Thompson."
Later, having recovered the manuscript to add to it the "Inscription" he returned it with:—
"Before I talk of anything else, let me thank you ab imis medullis for the one happy Christmas I have had for many a year. Herewith I send you my laggard poem. I have been delayed partly through making some minor corrections, but chiefly through having to transcribe the 'Inscription' at the close of it."
He had watched the piling up of family presents before making his own, and in the "Inscription" he tells:—
But one I marked who lingered still behind,
As for such souls no seemly gift had he:
He was not of their strain,
Nor worthy so bright beings to entertain,
Nor fit compeer for such high company;
Yet was he surely born to them in mind,
Their youngest nursling of the spirit's kind.
Last stole this one,
With timid glance, of watching eyes adread,
And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone;
And where the frail flower fell, it witheréd.
But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon;
As when a child, upstraining at your knees
Some fond and fancied nothings, says, "I give you these."
Of the first notion for this poem's title, "Amphicypellon," he wrote:—
"It refers to the αμφικυπελλον which Hephaestus, in Homer, bears round to the gods when he acts as cupbearer by way of joke. When Schliemann's things from Troy were first exhibited at South Kensington, I remember seeing among them a drinking-cup labelled 'Perhaps the amphicypellon of Homer.' It was a boat-shaped cup of plain gold, open at the top and with a crescentic aperture at either extremity of the rim, through which the wine could either be poured or drunk. So that you could pour from either end, and (if the cup were brimmed with wine) two people could have drunk from it at the same time, one at either extremity. In a certain sense, therefore, it was a double cup. And it had also two handles, one at either of its boat-shaped sides, so that it was a two-handled cup. You will see at once why I have applied the name to my double poem."
Later this title was abandoned:—
"Let it be 'Sister Songs' as you suggest. But keep 'an offering to two sisters' where it now is—on the title page. 'Sister Songs' was my own first alteration of the title, but was dropped I hardly know why."
One of his first articles after he left his always beloved Storrington was the notice of General Booth's In Darkest England. Called "Catholics in Darkest England," and signed "Francis Tancred," it appeared in Merry England for January 1891. Mr. Stead, in the Review of Reviews, wrote:—