For his words he had no need to seek far; they were more naturally remembered for use in the poetry of splendid artifice than the language of the street. His search was not deliberate. In the offices of the Church he found words to his hand, but he did not go to the offices on their account. It is doubtful if he borrowed even a monosyllable from a poet he did not love. Very rarely he made notes: "Pleached—an invaluable word," is the only memorandum I have come across. He had no list, like Rossetti's, of "stunning words for poetry," among them "gonfalon," "virelay," "citole," and "shent." He was at no pains to coin or collect, nor even to possess a theory. Bulwer Lytton's wholesale condemnation of Latinisms, and professed preference for such forms as scatterling and doomsman for "vagabond" and "executioner," were not the ways of a liberal master:—
"The labour, the art, the studious vocabulary," says the writer in the Nation, November 23, 1907, "are locked together within the strenuous grasp of the man's sincerity. There is no dissociating, no disintegrating, such poems as these; and Francis Thompson's heart beats in the words 'roseal,' 'cymars,' 'frore,' 'amiced,' 'lamped,' and so forth."
Being led on in certain studies he became attached to the terms specially connected with those studies. The process may be traced in the case of his use of the names of extinct animals. Their discovery he calls pure romance; "but the romance which lies in the new and unimagined forms, hidden from the poets and tale-tellers of all previous ages, and given up to eyes almost satiate with wonders, has yet to find its writers. . . . Tennyson has seen its uses for large and impressive allusion—
Nature brings not back the Mastodon,—
but Tennyson is almost alone even in the use of the theme. In an occasional later and younger poet you may find mention of the plesiosaure or other typical monster." Again, still reviewing Mr. Seeley's Dragons of the Air, Thompson writes:—
"We have strayed, it seems, into the ancient forge and workshop of Nature, where she is busy with her first experiments. . . . We behold, cast off from her anvil, in bewildering succession, shapes so fantastical, grotesque, and terrible, as never peopled the most lawless dreams of an Eastern haschish-eater; apparitions of inter-twisted types and composite phantasms, more and more strange than all the brute gods of Egypt. We are among the rough drafts of a creation."
The "occasional later and younger poet" was himself.
Of his partial acceptance of the criticism of the Press he makes sign in a note he had intended printing in New Poems:—
"Of words I have coined or revived I have judged fit to retain but few; and not more than two or three will be found in this book. I shall also be found, I hope, to have modified much the excessive loading both of diction and imagery which disfigured my former work."