rancis Thompson, born in Preston in 1859, spent the greater part of his mature life in London where he died in 1907. He was educated at Ushaw College near Durham, and afterwards went to Owens College, Manchester, to qualify as a doctor.
But his gift as prescriber and healer lay elsewhere than in the consulting-room. He walked to London in search of a living, finding, indeed, a prolonged near approach to death in its streets; until at length his literary powers were discovered by himself and by others, and he began, in his later twenties, an outpouring of verse which endured for a half-decade of years—his "Poems," his "Sister Songs," and his "New Poems."
"The Hound of Heaven" "marked the return of the nineteenth century to Thomas à Kempis." The great poetry of it transcended, in itself and in its influence, all conventions; so that it won the love of a Catholic Mystic like Coventry Patmore; was included by Dean Beeching in his "Lyra Sacra" among its older high compeers; and gave new heart to quite another manner of man, Edward Burne-Jones.
W. M.
