“Such quiet came, expectancy
Filled all the earth and sky:
Time seemed to pause a little space;
I heard a dream go by!”
Such subjects he always handles finely, leaving the thought in a spell of mild wonder and awe, as if something beautiful had passed and vanished. Similar effects were often possible with him in his younger days; and it is a question whether the moods from which such work proceeds recur after youth, the dream, has departed and taken that from the heart which “never comes again.” Those early pieces could not have been written by an indoors man; there is a refreshing quality of the open air in every line of them. The note is unusual, and is perhaps best sounded rarely; lightness and deftness are necessary to him who would evoke its entire purity and melody. In “The Death of the White Heron,” “A Flight Shot,” “Diana,” “The Fawn,” and “In the Haunts of Bass and Bream,” he trusted his fortunes to rhymed couplets of eight syllables, which are particularly well adapted to his purposes. The last-named poem relates with tantalizing deliberation the taking of a bass; the life of the stream pending the capture is described in musical, transitional passages to the refrain,—
“Bubble, bubble, flows the stream,
Like low music through a dream.”
He again employs couplets in one of the most appealing of all this series, “In Exile,” which is the prayer of an archer of the new world that England, the mother of archers, will call him home. Later Mr. Thompson essayed a number of poems in a flexible ode form, showing a broadening of his powers and a widening of his personal horizons. The flight in such pieces as “In Captivity” and “Before Sunrise” is longer than in the earlier poems. It is a pleasure to find a poet to whom America is so satisfactory as a field that he dares to set up the mocking-bird against the nightingale. Mr. Thompson makes the home-songster a medium for communicating the spirit and significance of our democracy to our friends overseas. The movement through all these poems is free and vigorous, and the irregular lines please by the happy chance of the rhymes. The pleasant winds of which the poet writes so refreshingly creep often into his measures. Patriotic subjects he touches with nobility and fervor; and he became the laureate of reconstruction when he penned his ringing poem “To the South,” the conclusion of which must not be omitted here:—
“I am a Southerner;
I love the South; I dared for her