His correspondent has written:—
"As a thinker, Francis Thompson is profoundly meditative, and, if pessimistic, then pessimistic with submission and fear, not with revolt. His thought must not be called gloomy, even when it is dark as night, for in the darkness there is a sense of open and heavenly air."
The most natural thing in the world (although at first he did not see it, having been a seminarist, a person not always apt to be in the secret) was that the singer of the Church—the Church that defined the Immaculate Conception—should be a poet of woman-kind—one of the Marians. Seminary training did not prepare him for a world of women. A note on the Marriage of Cana, which proves, he avers, that "much wine is needed before a man may go through with matrimony," is characteristic of his schooling. In humour the schooling lasted when all else had been outlived. His unpublished comedy "Man Proposes, Woman Disposes" is full of ready-made gibes, and his "Dress," printed in the Daily Mail, is threadbare comic verse on a subject he treated reverently enough when there was no joke to crack. It is still, perhaps, as the seminarist that he notes: "In Burmah the monks complain that women are natively incapable of any true understanding of religion." But it is a later Thompson who adds the comment: "The heart of woman is the citadel, the ultimum refugium of true religiosity." Genesis gives him the heading for several pages of a note-book devoted to such subjects: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman."
Rod, Root, and Flower set him to work in the same nursery-garden. His note-books reflect Patmore's aphoristic habit. He himself defended or denied the "fragmentary" nature of Patmore's book. "It might as well be said that the heavens are fragmentary, because the stars are not linked by golden chains. You are given the stars—the central and illuminative suggestions; you are left to work out for yourself, by meditations, the system of which they are the nodal points." This, it will be seen, is his rewriting of Patmore's own comment on the book, quoted at p. 201.
I can do no more than bring together his scattered notes on Woman. He himself could hardly have fitted them into any satisfactory sequence.
In a note-book I find:—
"The function of natural love is to create a craving which it cannot satisfy. And then only has its water been tasted in perfect purity, if it awakens an insatiate thirst of wine."
His hope is made known in his poetry:—
The Woman I behold, whose vision seek
All eyes and know not; t'ward whom climb
The steps of the world, and beats all wing of rhyme.