Its sad in sweet, its sweet in sad,
and Crashaw's
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
It did not come within his scope as a reviewer to mention the doubly direct coincidence (or something nearer) of his own:
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.
Coleridge and the other poets to whom Coleridge had guided him; Shelley and, in prose, de Quincey, are prominent in his early reading. To go to de Quincey's "Daughter of Lebanon" for the pedigree of "The Hound of Heaven" is like going to the grocer's for the seeds, in coloured packets, of the passion flower. But the Victorian tassels of the earlier piece do not hide its lessons—"to suffer that God should give by seeming to refuse"—and pursuit is the theme common to both, and common to writers of most ages. De Quincey did no more than hand it on. From St. Augustine's "Thou wast driving me on with Thy good, so that I could not be at rest until Thou wast manifest to the eye of my soul"; to Meister Eckhart's "He who will escape Him only runs to His bosom; for all corners are open to him," and so on, the idea is the same, though less elaborated and dramatic than in "The Hound."
In the "Mistress of Vision" the scenery and the lady are Shelleyan; one marvels that Thompson's teaching comes from those illusive lips. Thus would it have been written had such thoughts gained desired expression through Shelley. The thoughts are Francis Thompson's; the mode the other's. Mr. Beacock refers one to passages of the "Witch of Atlas," but the likeness is too elusively general to be caught in particular verses, and such things as the borrowing of "blosmy" are nothing more than clues, like the fragmentary débris of a paper-chase, to the whereabouts of an influence.
An early book of transcription contains a deal of Donne and Stevenson (including Father Damien and poems), a touch of Andrew Lang, more of Blunt, a little Meredith; much Rossetti and Cowley, some Suckling, the inevitable Browne, and a Theodore Watts. Drayton, too, is met in the Thompsonian verses: "Hear, my Muses, I demand," &c., so that when Mr. Chesterton says that the shortest way of describing the Victorian age is to say that Francis Thompson stood outside it, he might have gone on, with a little access of wilfulness, to say that the seventeenth century was best described by saying that in it was Francis Thompson.
Marvell he had not read till after his first books—"Just Crashaw and a little Cowley—and I had formed my style before I knew Cowley, whom I really did curiously resemble; though none perceived it, because none had read Cowley."
The Crashaw descent may be traced by way of Coleridge, who said of certain lines of the "Hymn to St. Teresa" that "They were ever present in my mind whilst writing the second part of 'Christabel'; if, indeed, by some process of the mind, they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem." Crashaw's Romanism did not interfere with Coleridge's pleasure, though in reading Herbert, whom he found "delicious," and at a time when he could note "that he was comparatively but little known," he paused over inquiries as to the exactness of that author's conformity to Protestantism. Coleridge was much taken with Herbert's "The Flower," a poem "especially affecting"—and naturally, to a poet. It is easy to suppose that Francis gave it particular attention on S. T. C.'s recommendation, and that he had in his mind the lines