CHAPTER XVII: LAST THINGS
FRANCIS'S health often dismayed him, and his terrors both in regard to sicknesses and politics covered many pages of threatening letters. The mere streets became more and more an oppression. Even Elgin Avenue grew (in 1900) as ugly to him as it always is to men less happily indifferent. At such times he could write to W. M. in the strain of the following letter:--
"I designed to call in on Wednesday, but was sick with a horrible journey on the underground. To-day, though better, I am still not well. I hope I may manage to-morrow. I have been full of worry, depression, and unconquerable forebodings. The other day, as I was walking outside my lodgings, steeped in ominous thoughts, a tiny child began to sing beside me in her baby voice, over and over repeating:--
'O danger, O danger O danger is coming near!'
My heart sank, and I almost trembled with fear."
He prophesied of war, and was tormented whole days by complications in the East, and the notion of a Yellow invasion. And even West Kensington, when small-pox was announced there, seemed to come marching on him, a Birnam forest of bricks. It was illness, with fear for a symptom. "Disaster was, and is, drawing downwards. . . . There are storm-clouds over the whole horizon, and I feel my private fate involved. I am oppressed with fatality," he writes in one letter (1900), and on the next page is involved in jokes which were heavy, not with fatality. Other letters contain complaints of dreams akin to Coleridge's:--
"A most miserable fortnight of torpid, despondent days, and affrightful nights, dreams having been in part the worst realities of my life."
On the engagement in 1903 of Monica of "The Poppy," of "Monica Thought Dying," and of _Sister Songs_, Francis wrote to her:--
"28 ELGIN AVENUE, _Saturday._
"DEAR MONICA,--I would have answered you long since if I had not been so worried with work that I do not know how to get through it. Having got rid of my poem, I have taken a little rest from work, to which I had no right, and my neuralgia seems happily to have got better--though I am almost afraid to say so, for I still feel very weak and jaded, so that it might easily return. Therefore I take this moment to write to you.
"Most warmly and sincerely I congratulate you, dear Monica, on what is the greatest event in a woman's life--or a man's, to my thinking. . . . Extend to him, if he will allow me, the affection which you once--so long since--purchased with a poppy in that Friston field. 'Keep it,' you said (though you have doubtless forgotten what you said) 'as long as you live.' I have kept it, and with it I keep you, my dearest. I do not say or show much, for I am an old man compared with you, and no companion for your young life. But never, my dear, doubt I love you. And if I have the chance to show it, I will do.
"I am ill at saying all I doubtless should say to a young girl on her engagement. I have no experience in it, my Monica. I can only say I love you; and if there is any kind and tender thing I should have said, believe it is in my heart, though it be not here.--My dear, your true friend,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
At her bidding, he went, on her marriage day, to the Church of St. Mary-of-the-Angels in Bayswater. He had never, in all probability, failed a tryst before by coming to it too early, but to all her commands he was obedient, and his mistake was but the symptom of his anxiety to be present. The poppy that she picked and gave him, with "Keep it as long as you live," was found in the leaves of his own copy of _Poems_--the only volume of his own works that he kept by him. So were all her injunctions observed. Having gone too early to Church, he left too early, and wrote:--
"WESTBOURNE GROVE, 12.30 P.M. _Wednesday, June 14, 1903._
"DEAREST MONICA,--You were a prophetess (though you needed not to be a sibyl) to foretell my tricks and manners. I reached the church just ten minutes after twelve, to find vacancy, as you had forewarned me. A young lady that might have been yourself approached the church by the back entrance, just as I came away; but on inspection she had no trace of poppy-land. There must have been other nuptial couples about, I think.
"It seems but the other day, my dearest sister (may I not call you so? For you are all to me as younger sisters and brothers--to me, who have long ceased practically to have any sisters of my own, so completely am I sundered from them), that you were a child with me at Friston, and I myself still very much of a child. Now the time is come I foresaw then--
Knowing well, when some few days are over, You vanish from me to another.
"You may pardon me if I feel a little sadness, even while I am glad for your gladness, my very dear.
"I was designing to call in to-night, till I learned from you that you would be occupied with your wedding-party. Then I hoped I might have got to you last night instead, but could not manage it. So, to my sorrow, I must be content only to write. Had I known before, I would have called in on Sunday, at all costs, rather than defer it to (as it turns out) the impossible Wednesday.
"I shall be with you all, at any rate, in spirit.--Yours ever dearly, my dear,
FRANCIS THOMPSON."
A few years before his death his manner had changed. His platitudes, now, were merely a means of getting through an evening without making a demonstration of the trouble he was in. That his ills might not be exposed he kept covering them up with talk, as constantly as a mother tucks in a child restless in fever. The man who always takes laudanum is always in need of it, and when he is in need he is ill. He is too ill to think, too uncomfortable to meditate or be wise.
Whenever he postponed his dram, and spent his day instead with his friends, he would say an easy thing once, and finding it easy, would say it over and over again. While he spent an evening explaining that last August was hot, but this hotter, his cry really was, "Where is my laudanum?" Nor was his need only physical: his soul, too, was crying, "Where is my God, my Maker, Who giveth songs in the Night? Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of Heaven?" I am told by a doctor that one of the greatest pains of relinquishing opium is the sense of the reason's unfitness. Thought is thrown out of joint, and hurts like a dislocated shoulder.
"Nature," says Emerson, "never spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she mars her creature with some deformity or defect, lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise." And even for the bruises made by poppies she has her salve. Some redress, a rebate of the price paid, was made to Francis Thompson for the agony of the opium habit. That he seldom spoke of it meant that it was a thing too bitter to speak of; meant, too, that it was at times a thing too little to speak of, that Nature minimised its terrors. There is mercy for the slave of a bad habit: the more confirmed, the more often must there be periods during which its mastery is forgotten, even in its presence. The sorriest drunkard is not necessarily the drunkard oftenest sorry. The opium-eater is sometimes persuaded of his own invented theory of the causes of his weakness, of its uses and necessity. Francis, who would have loathed himself to the point of extinction, or redemption, if he had been an ordinary sinner, who would have found life with himself intolerable had he sullied life with common offences against the Law, was provided with some sort of protection against remorse for his own particular failing. Nature gave him poppies to set against poppies.
Periods of misery and dejection came to him, as to his fellows. With Coleridge he could in certain moods have written:--"The stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind; but when I am alone, the horrors that I have suffered from laudanum, the degradation, the blighted utility, almost overwhelm me." And again in words very like de Quincey's, Coleridge speaks of "fearful slavery," of being "seduced to the accursed habit ignorantly." From the starker visitations of remorse Coleridge, too, was justly sheltered. His son has said for him:--
"If my Father sought more from opium than the mere absence of pain, I feel assured it was not luxurious sensations or the glowing phantasmagoria of passive dreams; but that the power of the medicine might keep down the agitations of his nervous system, like a strong hand grasping the strings of some shattered lyre."
His own "my sole sensuality was not to be in pain" is sufficient for himself and for others.
F. T.'s comments on Coleridge's case are valuable, since they rebound in his own direction:--
"Then came ill-health and opium. Laudanum by the wine-glassful and half-pint at a time soon reduced him to the journalist-lecturer and philosopher, who projected all things, executed nothing; only the eloquent tongue left. So he perished--the mightiest intellect of the day, and great was the fall thereof. There remain of him his poems, and a quantity of letters painful to read. They show him wordy, full of weak lamentation, deplorably feminine and strengthless."
And again:--
"It is of the later Coleridge that we possess the most luminous descriptions. A slack, shambling man, flabby in face and form and character; womanly and unstayed of nature; torrentuous of golden talk, the poet submerged and feebly struggling in opium-darkened oceans of German philosophy, amid which he finally foundered, striving to the last to fish up gigantic projects from the bottom of a daily half-pint of laudanum. And over the wreck of that most piteous and terrible figure of all our literary history shines and will shine for ever the five-pointed star of his glorious youth; those poor five resplendent poems, for which he paid the devil's price of a desolated life and unthinkably blasted powers."
Even if Francis spilled brown laudanum on his paper as he wrote those superlatives, he did not fit the cap of disaster to two heads.
In 1906 he again visited the monastery at Crawley, where his friends had offered him hospitality over many years, and helped him to keep an occasional feast. I take a sample at random of Prior Anselm's courtesy:--
"HOLY SATURDAY.
"DEAR FRANCIS,--The Alleluias have been sung, and I echo them to you, dearest friend, hoping they bring you joy and peace and blessings."
Again:--
"DEAR FRANCIS,--Could you give me and the community the great pleasure of your company on the Feast of St. Anthony, when the Bishop of Southwark will assist? I do hope you will come, as it is the last feast I shall have before the Chapter, an event that may scatter us all to the four winds of heaven."
And again:--
"The community and particularly myself would be delighted to have the pleasure of your company on Oct. 4th, the Feast of our holy Father St. Francis and your name-day. I am looking forward to some long talks. How I long for a return of the happy days at Pantasaph, when we discussed all things in heaven and on earth and in infernis."
Before his departure to Crawley Francis wrote to me:--
". . . I feel depressed at going away from you all--it seems like a breaking with my past, the beginning of I know not what change, or what doubtful future. Change _as_ change is always hateful to me; yet my life has been changeful enough in various ways. And I have noticed these changes always come in shocks and crises after a prolonged period of monotony. In my youth I sighed against monotony, and wanted romance; now I dread romance. Romance is romantic only for the hearers and onlookers, not for the actors. It is hard to enter its gates (happily); but to repass them is impossible. Once step aside from the ways of 'comfortable men,' you cannot regain them. You will live and die under the law of the intolerable thing they call romance. Though it may return on you in cycles and crises, you are ever dreading its next manifestation. Nor need you be 'romantic' to others; the most terrible romances are inward, and the intolerableness of them is that they pass in silence. . . . One person told me that my own life was a beautiful romance. 'Beautiful' is not my standpoint. The sole beautiful romances are the Saints', which are essentially inward. But I never meant to write all this."
All this, and much unwritten trepidation, because he had to travel three-fourths of the railroad to Brighton! Of all places Sussex, he had said, was the place where he preferred to live; but the getting him there was as difficult as a journey to Siberia. And from Crawley he wrote:--
"I am a helpless waterlogged and dismasted vessel, drifting without power to guide my own course, and equally far from port whichever way I turn my eyes. I can only fling this bottle into the sea and leave you to discern my impotent and wrecked condition."
The flung bottle was stamped and caught the post!
In the following year (1907) it became evident that F. T. was again in urgent need of change. He was thinner, even less punctual, more languorous when he fell into fits of abstraction; less precise when he would have assumed the pathetically alert step and speech by which he had been used to respond to introductions and the calls of the very unexacting establishment he still visited sometimes twice, sometimes thrice, and always once a week. He had grown listless and slow, and it was proposed he should go to the country. "Certainly, Wilfrid," he responded, coming the next evening to explain it was impossible; his boots, which looked stronger than himself, would not travel, he said; the coat covering his insufficient shoulders was insufficient. Boots and shirts were bought. It was arranged that we should call for him the next day at eleven. Accordingly my father and I and a friend presented ourselves in a motor at his dwelling, prepared to wait his dressing-time. But he was already out; nor could his landlady, who had not seen him abroad at such an hour in all her experience, say why or where. When at last he came, he carried a paper bag with food purchased at a shop far distant. No gourmet could have been at greater pains to secure the particular pork-pie, and no other, that he wanted.
At first he and I had sleeping quarters in an independent pavilion among fern and young oaks, as guests of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt at Newbuildings. Breakfast and a log-fire used to be prepared for us by David, a genius among odd-men, who came through the dew before we were awake, and disturbed us with the fragrance of his toast and coffee. Francis would get up quite early, but at night he was late. I used to see him in his room, propped against pillows, with candles burning and his prayer-book in his hand far into the night; and his light would still be bright when the stars had begun to grow faint in the plantation.
Later, he was moved to David's cottage, whence he was fetched every day to Newbuildings, half a mile away, for luncheon and tea. David and Mrs. David had gained the unwilling confidence of the invalid, and Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, adept in everything, himself saw that medical help was necessary. In September a doctor was consulted, but if no effective treatment followed it was probably because Francis's evasions successfully prevented a satisfactory diagnosis.
To the care he received in Sussex there was no end. On September 6, 1907, a companion of Mr. Blunt wrote:--
"Mr. Blunt paid Mr. Thompson a long visit last evening, and I hear to-day that he is better. He told Mr. Blunt that he will stay here for the present. The doctor is going to see him again. Mr. Thompson liked him, which is something gained, and he is also pleased with David and his wife. Mr. Thompson has not come to-day, but we have sent twice, and the boy will enquire again this evening."
His little tragedy at Newbuildings was a wasp-sting. Enmity had started some days before, when a wasp fell into his wine-glass. It got out and was staggering on the table when I came upon the scene. Francis stood still, watching with fire in his eye. "You _drunken_ brute," he said with loud severity. But no wasp, drunken or respectable, would he kill, though he could be bitter. The next day he was stung, and Mr. Wilfrid Blunt holds it of faith that for all that summer, after the poet's malediction, no wasps buzzed in Sussex. "Sir, to leave things out of a book merely because people tell you they will not be believed, is meanness," says Mr. Blunt in the words of Dr. Johnson. For all that (since a biographer's unbelief must count for something) I do not here record the lesser miracles remembered by Mr. Blunt. But the following (an earlier experience) is of Francis's own telling, in _Health and Holiness_:--
"In solitude a poet underwent profound sadness and suffered brief exultations of power: the wild miseries of a Berlioz gave place to accesses of half-pained delight. On a day when the skirts of a prolonged darkness were drawing off for him, he walked the garden, inhaling the keenly languorous relief of mental and bodily convalescence, the nerves sensitised by suffering. Passing in a reverie before an arum, he suddenly was aware of a minute white-stoled child sitting on the lily. For a second he viewed her with surprised delight, but no wonder; then returning to consciousness, he recognised the hallucination almost in the instant of her vanishing."
Father Gerrard, who met him in Sussex, afterwards wrote:--
"Only a few weeks ago, I was chatting with Francis Thompson in his cosy retreat at Southwater, whither he had gone as the guest of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, to see if haply he might pull together his shattered frame. But the phthisis fiend had caught him in a tight grip. He was a dying man, and an old man, although only forty-eight years of age. Still, even in his extremity the characteristics of his life were manifest, a shrinking from fellowship, a keen perception and love of the Church, a ready and masterful power of language. I could not say that conversation with him was ever an easy thing, if by conversation one means unceasing talk. Besides talk there were thoughtful silences. Then, after the thought, came the outpouring of its rich expression. The doings of the outside world had little interest for him, but the messages which I had for him from his little circle of friends set him all aglow."
He returned weaker than he went. In his extremity of feebleness any hurt seemed grievous to him. Upon an umbrella falling against him in the railway carriage, he turned to me with a tremulous: "I am the target of all disasters!" And when a busy-body of a fellow asked him, on account of his notable thinness: "Do you suffer with your chest, sir?" Thompson, who had but one lung, and that diseased, answered sharply, "No!" Even then he did not know the extent of his trouble.
In error he attributed all his ills to one cause. My father, seeing him on his return, said to him, "Francis, you are ill." "Yes, Wilfrid," he answered, "I am more ill than you think"; and then spoke a word from which both had refrained for ten years. "I am dying from laudanum poisoning."
My father asked him if he were willing to go to the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth. The fact that my sister--the Sylvia of _Sister Songs_--chanced at that moment to be lying ill there, led him to consider the institution without hostility, and the next day, my father having previously recommended him to the nuns, he went unreluctant to his death-bed. Consumption was the mortal disease, and he had grown grievously thin, and too weak to be allowed much less than his habitual doses of laudanum. Some little while before the hours at which these became due, the tax upon his remaining strength was very heavy; but only when in acutest need of the one medicine that could keep him alive (as, indeed, it had done over a long course of years) were the last days distressing for him. During most of them (he was in St. John and St. Elizabeth's ten days) he was content with his surrounding, and knew Sister Michael, his most kind nurse.
His reading was divided between his prayer-book and Mr. W. W. Jacobs' _Many Cargoes_, neither of which attested his realisation of the end. But he was not ignorant of it. When I last saw him he took my father's hand and kept it within his own, chafing and patting it as if to make a last farewell. He died at dawn on November 13, 1907.
But, for all that friends were at hand, the nurse tender, and the priest punctual, his passing was solitary. His bedside was not one at which watchers share commingling cold, as when a widow's burning fingers, holding those of her dead, are turned to inner ice; his going not as a child's, which chills the house. The fires quenched were his own. It seemed to his friends as if it were a matter personal to himself; while their sorrow for their own loss was mixed almost with satisfaction at something ended in his favour, as if at last he had had his way in a transaction with a Second Party, who might have long and painfully delayed the issue.
Nothing improvident or improper, it seemed to those at hand, had happened in the hospital ward. Such were one's feelings beside the tall window, among nuns who smiled happily because he had received the Sacraments. His features, when I went to make a drawing of him in the small mortuary that stood among the wintry garden-trees, were entirely peaceful, so that I, who had sometimes known them otherwise, fell into the mood of the cheerful lay-sister with the keys, who said: "I hear he had a very good death." To the priest, who had seen him in communion with the Church and her saints at the moment which may be accounted the most solitary possible to the heart of man, no thought of especial loneliness was associated with his death.
He was too magnanimous to take one to his dead heart. Suffering alone, he escaped alone, and left none strictly bound on his account. He left his friends to be busy, not with his ashes, but his works. It was as if the winds that caught and checked his breath were those that blew his fame into conspicuous glows. He was laid to rest in St. Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green. In his coffin, W. M. records, were roses from Meredith's garden, inscribed with Meredith's testimony--"A true poet, one of the small band," and violets went to the dead poet's breast from the hand of my mother whose praises he had divinely sung.
"Devoted friends lament him," wrote W. M., "no less for himself than for his singing. But let none be named the benefactor of him who gave to all more than any could give to him. He made all men his debtors, leaving to those who loved him the memory of his personality, and to English poetry an imperishable name."
Index
ABSENT-MINDEDNESS, Francis Thompson's, 9, 26 _n._, 31, 276
_Academy, The_, 71 _n._, 329; articles by F. T. in, 42, 163-4, 255, 257, 259-64, 267-70, 316, 321, 332-3; poems by F. T. in, 255, 259, 337; F. T.'s connexion with, 245, 253-64, 334-5
Accent, 176
Acerbity, F. T.'s assumed, 89
Aeschylus, 58, 90
"After her Going," 183
"After Woman, The," 195, 228-9
Aloofness, F. T.'s, 8, 24, 35-6, 279-80
Alphonsus, Father, 181
"Amelia Applejohn," 247
_American Ecclesiastical Review_, 143
"Amphicypellon" (_Sister-Songs_), 105-106, 294
Ann (De Quincey's), 63, 83
Ann (Francis Thompson's), 63, 81-4, 92
Anger, F. T.'s incapacity for, 54, 141-2
Anselm, Fr. (now Archbishop of Simla), 174, 180-1, 183, 189-90; letters to F. T., 344-5
"Anthem of Earth, An," 37, 47, 177, 201, 241; alluded to, 157
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 218
Archer, Mr. William, 144, 152-3, 337; quoted, 241; letter to F. T., 242
Arnold, Matthew, F. T. on, 170
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 233
Ashbourne, Lord, 183
Ashton-under-Lyne, 5, 39, 71
Asquith, Mr., 160
"Assumpta Maria," 173-4
Astrology, 330
"Astronomer, A Dead," 124, 126
Athenæum, The, poem by F. T. in, 235; reviews of F. T. in, 144-6, 241; F. T.'s connexion with, 243, 326, 336
Augustine, St., quoted, 147, 165; F. T. on, 172
Austin, Mr. Alfred, 332
_Ave Maria_ (Notre Dame, Indiana), 137 _n._
BALLANTYNE, R. M., 16
Barry, Rev. Canon, 171
Beacock, Mr., _Concordance to F. T._, 154, 165, 167
Beardsley, Aubrey, 323-4
Bearne, Fr. David, 185
Beauty, female, 10, 12
Bennett, Mr. Arnold, 149-50
Berlioz, 55, 348
Bernard, St., 172, 191, 288
Beuno's, St., College, 185
Bible, the, its diction, 158, 171; symbolism in, 191, 194, 196; F. T.'s reading of, 172-3; Apocalypse, 172-3; Canticles, 223; Ecclesiastes, 173, 193, 238; Genesis, 227; Pentateuch, 223; the Prophets, 196, 264; Psalms, 194, 196, 209; St. John, 189, 225
Blackburn, Mrs., 126, 143, 252
Blackburn, Vernon, 21, 95, 126-7, 138-9, 152
Blackfriars, 64, 278
Blake, 331; quoted, 223; F. T.'s reading of, 58, 90; Mr. E. J. Ellis on, 219
Blunt, Mr. W. Scawen, 85 _n._, 137, 245, 347-8; quoted, 131 _n._; F. T. on, 256; F. T.'s reading of, 165
_Bookman, The_, review of _New Poems_, 241; Mr. Garvin's article in, on F. T., 167, 243
Bootblack, F. T. as a, 65
Booth, Mr. Bramwell, 107
Booth, "General," 79-80, 106
Bootmaker's assistant, F. T. as a, 71-5
Boys and boyhood, 17-19, 21
Breviary, the, 171-3, 182
Bridges, Mr. Robert, 136
"Brin," 118
_British Review_, 240
Broads, the Norfolk, 118, 173
Brondesbury, 45, 274
Brontë, Charlotte, 76-7, 127, 328
"Broom-branch at Twilight, A," 304
Browne, Sir Thomas, quoted, 84, 95-6; F. T.'s reading of, 95, 165; his diction, 47, 155-6
Browning, E. B., 124, 127
Browning, R., Browning on F. T., 120-2, 124, 137 _n._; William Sharp's _Life_ of, reviewed by F. T., 121, 124; his obscurity, 146; his diction, 154-5; his observation, 275
Bryan, Maggie, 230
Bunyan, 225
"Bunyan in the Light of Modern Criticism," 92, 267
Burns, Robert, F. T. compared with, 140; F. T. on, 168, 263-4
Burton's _Anatomy of Melancholy_, 188
Butler, Samuel (_Hudibras_), 196, 270
"By Reason of thy Law," 174
CAMPION, 152
Cancelled passages, 107-8
Canon Law in _Her Portrait_, 174
"Captain of Song, A," 235
Capuchins, 128, 140, 180-1
Cardan, 196
Cardinal points, symbolism of the, 192-6
Carlisle Place, 108
Carmen, 102
"Carmen Genesis," 285-6, 309-10
_Carmina Mariana_, 173
Carroll, Dr., late Bishop of Shrewsbury, 24, 107 _n._, 117, 144; letters to, 97, 123
Casartelli, Dr., Bishop of Salford, 15
_Catholic Encyclopædia_, 335
_Catholic World_ (N.Y.), 137 _n._
Catholicism, F. T. on, 59-60, 224
"Catholics in Darkest England," 106
Cawein, Mr. Madison, 268-9
Chambers, Mr. E. K., 154
Chancery Lane, 253-4
Chapman, 175
Charing Cross, 61; post office, 86-8
Charles Borromeo, St., 208-9
Chatterton, 61
Chelsea, 4, 82
Chesterfield, Lord, 272
Chesterton, Mr. G. K., 165, 208, 331
_Child set in the midst by Modern Poets, The_, 123
_Child who will never grow old, The_, 250
Children and Childhood. F. T.'s childhood, 5-14, 24, 98; his child-likeness, 247, 249; his ways with children, 74, 104, 114-17, 119, 251; on the children of London, 79-82
Chisholm, Mr. Hugh, 140
Church, the, 202, 226, 322
Church Court (or Passage), Chancery Lane, 5, 68
"Clarendon" Reading Room, 68
Clarke, Fr. R. F., 85, 193
Clement, St., 222-3
Cobbe, Frances Power, 260-1
Cock, Mr. Albert, 201
Coleridge, F. T.'s early reading of, 10, 96, 161-2, 241; affinities and analogies with F. T., 3, 47, 49, 56, 71 _n._, 94-5, 163, 241, 325, 340, 343-4; and opium, 53; as a poet, 127, 163-4; quoted, 166, 179, 205
"Collecting" books, 62
Collins, 87
Colwyn Bay, 12-13, 44
Constable & Co., Messrs., 277
"Contemplation," 222
_Contemporary Review_, 136
Conversation, F. T.'s, 47, 62, 111, 253, 311-12, 314, 342, 349
Cooper, T. Fenimore, 16
Corbishly, Monsignor, 26
Corporal Punishment, 19-20
"Corymbus for Autumn, A," 137 _n._, 167
Courage, F. T.'s lack of active, 55, 62
Covent Garden, 76-7, 91, 273, 278
Cowley, 170; F. T. compared to, 146-7; diction, 155; F. T.'s reading of, 165-7; quoted, 173
Crashaw, F. T. and, 144, 146-7, 164, 166-7, 179, 257, 267-8, 288
Crawley, 112, 181, 189, 344-6
Cricket, 13, 39-45, 326, 328
_Critic, The_ (N.Y.), 137, 240
Cross, the, 6, 95 _n._, 193 _n._, 211-13
Crosskell, Canon Charles, Procurator of Ushaw, 26
Crowley, Mr. Aleister, 268
Cuthbert, Fr., 189
_Daily Chronicle_, reviews of F. T., 135, 145, 170, 240, 241; review of Mrs. Meynell, 149; paragraph by A. M., 159; odes by F. T. in, 321, 333
_Daily Mail_, verse by F. T. in, 227; F. T.'s reading of, 314-15, 328
_Daily News_, 241
"Daisy," 104, 118, 123, 140, 160, 167
Daniel, Samuel, 270
Dante, 14, 87, 170, 172, 200
Darwinism, 244
"Daughter of Lebanon" (De Quincey's), 84, 164
David, Mr. and Mrs., 347
Davidson, John, 136, 140-1, 176, 311
"Dead Cardinal of Westminster, To the," 107-8 (cancelled stanzas), 129, 167, 226
de Bary, Mr. Richard, 182
Dedications to _Poems_ and _New Poems_, 128, 236-7
Denbigh, Lady, 186
Depression, F. T.'s fits of, 27, 47, 96, 185
De Quincey, affinities and analogies with F. T., 46-7, 50-2, 62-3, 76, 83-84, 95, 168, 329, 343; F. T.'s reading of, 46-7, 50, 53-4, 98, 164-5, 267-8; and opium, 48-9, 51-3, 95; otherwise quoted, 133 _n._
Despairs and panics, 117-8, 316-7, 335
De Vere, Aubrey, 269
Diction, F. T.'s, 132-3, 148, 152-60, 193
Dimbovitza, The Bard of the, 264
Dolls, 9-10
"Domus Tua," 130, 148
Donne, 148, 155, 165, 173-4, 212 _n._, 213
Doubleday, Mr. and Mrs., 242, 247-8; letter to Mr. Doubleday, 306 _n._
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 269
Dowling, Mr. Richard, 267
Dowson, Ernest, 160, 323-4
Drayton, Michael, 154-5, 165, 270
"Dread of Height, The," 220, 222, 225
"Dream Tryst," 13-14, 92, 102, 124, 167
"Dress" (verses in _Daily Mail_), 227
Driffield, Fr., 101
Drummond of Hawthornden, 208
Drury Lane, 89
Dryden, 101, 146, 155, 175, 307
_Dublin Review_, 94, 96-7, 100, 201
Dumas, 259
EARLY verse, 27-30
Ecclesiastical Ballads, 169, 195 _n._, 283
Eckhart, Meister, 165
Edgbaston, 248
Edgware Road, 65, 275, 287
_Edinburgh Review_, 150-1, 171, 185, 241, 246
Egoism, the poets', 308
Egyptian religion, 193-4, 196, 222-3
Elgin Avenue, 273-4, 280, 339
Eliot, George, 127
Elision, 132
Elizabethans, the, 177, 256, 270, 334
Embankment, Thames, 24, 278
Emerson, 321, 342
Encyclopædia, an, 56
Enlistment, 56-7, 163
"Erotic" poet(!), F. T. as an, 3, 14 _n._, 124
Esotericism, 191-6, 223-4
Eternal punishment, 226
Etymologies, 159-60
Eve, the New, 194-5
Exercise-books, 32, 34, 104
Extinct animals, 37, 157
FAILURES, F. T.'s successive, 32-4, 54-6, 57
Fairy Tales, 14, 103, 116
"Fallen Yew, The," 108, 109, 132
Fancy and imagination, 191
Feilding, Everard, 186-8
Fiona Macleod, 260
Fisher, Mr., 334
Fletcher, Fr. Philip, 124
"Form and Formalism," 215
Formby, Mr., 127
_Fortnightly Review_, 126, 139, 146-9
Francis, St., of Assisi, 60, _quoted_, 181-2, 283, 295; F. T. on, 181, 295-6
Francis, St., of Sales, 127, 270
_Franciscan Days of Vigil_ (De Bary's) _quoted_, 182
Franciscans, the, 110 _n._, 180-3
Freemasonry, 193 _n._
Friston, Suffolk, 118-19, 340-1
"From the night of Forebeing," 166, 184
F. S., 25
GALE, Mr. Norman, 136, 140, 249
Gardner, Mr. Edmund, 211 _n._
Garvin, Mr. James, 122
Garvin, Mr. Louis, 122-3, 145, 167, 243; letters to F. T., 332-3
Gentleness, F. T.'s extreme, 20, 119
Gerrard, Fr. T. J., 348
Ghosh, Mr. S. K., 211-12 _n._, 317
Ghost, a, 186-7, 188
Gibbon, 26
Gillow, Canon Henry, 15, 26
Glasgow, 55-6
Gloom, 133, 227
Golden Halfpennies, the, 67
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 152
Granville Place, 45, 314
Greco, El, 327
_Guardian, The_, 240
Guildhall Library, London, 63, 91
HARDY, Mr. Thomas, 265-6, 268
Harrow Road, 190, 281
Head, Dr. Henry, 186-8
Hawthorne, _quoted_, 24, 293
Hayes, Mr. Alfred, 248-9
_Health and Holiness_, 288-90, 348
"Heard on the Mountain," 175, 306
Hearn, Lafcadio, 15, 20, 21-3
Henley, W. E., F. T. on, 136, 177-8, 256, 263, 266-7; on F. T., 149, 262-4; meeting with, 264-6
Herbert, George, 166-7, 283, 305
"Her Portrait," 127, 141, 174
Hind, C. Lewis, 253, 263-5, 321; letters from F. T. to, 256-64; letter to F. T. from, 264
Hinkson, Mrs., _see_ Tynan, Katharine
Holyhead, 13
Homer, 74, 105
Hospital, F. T. in, 94, 349-50
Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, 349-50
"Hound of Heaven, The," 84, 122, 137 _n._, 144, 164-5, 176, 205-6, 211, 300, 319
Housman, Mr. Laurence, 135
Hügel, Baron von, 201
Hugo, Victor, 98, 175, 306 _n._
Humility, F. T.'s, 187, 237
Humorous verse, 13, 27-8, 111-12, 331
Hunt, Leigh, 191
Huxley, 74
Hyde, Mr. William, 277, 281; letter from F. T. to, 277
"IDYLLS of the King," F. T. on the, 101
_Ignatius Loyola, Life of St._, 336
Illness and ill-health, 46, 94, 104, 125, 129, 257, 260, 272-3, 339, 349
Imagery, F. T.'s, 13, 91, 187, 207, 216; F. T. on his own imagery, 97-8, 158; F. T.'s imagery criticised, 148; A. M. on imagery, 216-17; F. T. on imagery in general, 151, 215-17, 219
Imagination, 191, 215-16
_Imperial and Colonial Magazine_, 335
Indifference to comfort, F. T.'s, 287, 288
Individualism, F. T. on, 108-10
Individuality, 108
Inexpertness, F. T.'s, 8, 75
Inobservance, F. T.'s, 274, 276
_Irish Monthly_, 185
JACOBS, Mr. W. W., 266, 271, 350
Jacopone da Todi, 309, 323
James, Henry, 329
Jerome, St., 171
Joan of Arc, 199
John, St., 225. _See also_ Bible
John, St., and St. Elizabeth, Hospital of, 283, 349-50
John of the Cross, St., 146, 224
Johnson, Dr., 325; quoted, 348
Johnson, Lionel, 85, 323; quoted, 152, 282
Josephus, 74
Joubert, quoted, 200 (222)
Journalism, 93, 111, 316, 334
"Judgment in Heaven, A," 59, 136, 137, 144, 167
KEATS, 92, 150, 152, 164, 193, 243, 307, 318
Kelsall, an actor, 64
Kempis, Thomas à, 225-6, 243, 283
Kensall Green, St. Mary's Cemetery, 351
Kensington Gardens, 104, 114-15
Kent, W. H., 174
Kent's Bank, near Alverstone, 13
Kilburn, 268, 274
King, Miss Katharine Douglas, 250-1; letters to F. T. 250-1
King, Mrs. Hamilton, letters to F. T., 132, 250
Kingsford, Anna, 174
Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 126, 170, 175, 262, 268, 270
L., Miss, 60
Laburnum, 29, 273
Ladysmith, siege of, 9
Lamb, Charles, 20, 61, 321
Landor, 260
Landladies, 274, 279-80, 317
Lane, Mr. John, 129, 135-6, 145, 184
Lang, Mr. Andrew, 136-7, 139, 165
Latin, 171
Latinisms, 33, 155-7
Laureateship, the, 233-4
Lecky, Mr. Walter, 137
Le Gallienne, Mr. Richard, 135-6, 141, 145, 149
Leo XIII., 283
Leonard Square, 250
Leslie, Mr. Shane, 91
Libraries, F. T. as a haunter of, 10, 16, 25, 27, 37, 47, 63
Light, 190, 238 _n._
Light-heartedness, F. T.'s, 27-8, 77
Lilly, W. S., _Century of Revolution_, 124
"Lily of the King, The," 283
_Literary World_, 240
Liturgy, the, 30-31, 33, 156, 171-4
Lockyer, Sir Norman, 238
Lodge, 160
Lodging-houses, 64-5
"Lodi, Storming of the Bridge, at," 26
Log-rolling, 138, 140-143
London, F. T. on, 77, 79, 277-9; F. T. in, 46, 54, 61-93, 104, 236
Lord's, 44-5
Love and love-affairs, 11, 14, 38, 73-4, 230-2
"Love declared," 230
Lower-worldliness, F. T.'s, 64-7
Lucas, Mr. E. V., 41, 45, 253, 264
Lucas, Winifrid (Mrs. H. Le Bailly), 250
Lytton-Bulwer, 74, 157, 265
Lytton, Hon. Neville, 337
MACAULAY, 10, 26, 169, 260
Maeterlinck, 198-9
"Magic, Varia on," 188, 193
"Making of Viola, The," 59, 93, 122, 158, 179
"Man Proposes, Woman Disposes," 227, 337 _n._
Manchester, F. T. in, 35-6, 46-9, 51, 55, 58, 61, 75, 84, 274
_Manchester Guardian_, 145, 332
Mangan, 168
Mann, Rev. Horace K., 15-16, 19, 24, 26
Manning, Cardinal, 79, 85 _n._, 107-8, 111, 290
Marianus, Fr., 180
Maries, Mrs., 274, 318
Marlowe, 168, 244
Marryat, Captain, 16
Martin, Miss Agnes, 3, 4
"Martyrs, To the English," 275
Marvell, 165
Mary, the Blessed Virgin, 46 _n._, 172-3, 227, 228
Mary Ignatius, Sister (F. T.'s aunt), 5
Mary of St. J. F. de Chantal, Sister (F. T.'s aunt), 5
Mary of the Angels, St., Bayswater, 281, 341
Mary's, St., Cemetery, Kensal Green, 351
Massingham, Mr. H. W., letters to F. T., 332, 336-7
May, Mr. (F. T.'s cousin), 46
McMaster, Mr., 70-76
Medal, a consecrated, 13, 73
Medical student, F. T. as, 35-56
Melpomene, the Vatican, 37-8
_Mercure de France_, 319
Meredith, George, F. T.'s reading of, 150, 165, 266; on A. M., 233; F. T.'s meetings with, 245-7; on F. T., 246-7, 351
_Merry England_, 85, 110, 113, 121, 193, 250; poems by F. T. in, 87-8, 92, 95, 102, 107, 120, 122, 124, 126, 130-31, 137 _n._, 138, 304; prose articles by F. T. in, 85, 92, 96, 106, 179
Metaphor and simile, 151
Metre, 151, 158-9, 175-9, 220
Meynell, Alice, on F. T., 94-5, 107, 126, 155, 157, 179, 216-17, 226-7, 320, 331; F. T. on, 86, 113, 126-8, 133 _n._, 136, 146, 148-9, 216; other references, 95, 120-1, 137, 183, 194, 224, 234, 238, 245-7, 250, 256, 336; letters from F. T. to, 130-1, 133 _n._, 159, 177, 183, 188-9, 226, 297, 312, 313; letters to F. T., 129, 139, 158
Meynell family, F. T. and the, 114, 116-7, 160, 184, 247, 268
Meynell, Mr. Wilfrid, F. T. and, 87, 89-92, 95, 97, 107, 111, 137, 143, 194, 247, 250, 262, 284 _n._, 303, 317, 327, 336, 349; F. T. on, 86; on F. T., 98-100, 123, 124-5, 320-2; letters from F. T. to, 85, 88, 100, 103-4, 110 _n._, 114-17, 129, 135, 145-6, 180, 183, 234-5, 238, 242, 250, 316-18, 335, 337, 339; other letters to, 58, 107 _n._, 120, 140, 183, 186-8, 247-8
Michael, Sister, 350
Mills, Mr. J. Saxon, 39, 60
Milton, 140, 155-6, 159, 196, 281, 307
Miracles, 67, 348
"Mistress of Vision, The," 165, 222, 237, 240-1
Monica Mary (Saleeby, _née_ Meynell), 113-14, 118-19, 148, 340-1; letters to, 340-1
"Monica thought dying, To," 132, 145
"Monica, To, after nine years," 119
Moore, Mr. Sturge, 269, 315
_Morning Post_, 152, 240
Morris, Sir Lewis, 190
Moulton, Mrs. Louise Chandler, 252
Murderer, a ("D. I."), 64, 78
Music, F. T.'s love of, 55
Mysticism, true and false, 148, 198-9 221, 223, 237
Mythologies, 196
NAPOLEON JUDGES, 337 _n._
Nares' Glossary, 154
"Narrow Vessel, A," 229-32
_Nation, The_, 155, 157, 179, 216, 320, 336
_National Observer_, 138
_National Review_, 233
Nature, F. T. on, 30, 131-2, 205-7, 211
Nerses, St., the Armenian, 173-4
New Brighton, 13
_New Poems_ (1897), 187; its reception, 136, 150, 239-43, 253, 308; a cancelled preface, 158, 175-6, 185, 220, 237-8; mysticism in, 201, 214, 238; F. T. on, 236, 238-9, 301, 306; dedication, 236-7
_New York Post_, 137
Newbolt, Mr. Henry, 139, 269
_Newcastle Daily Chronicle_, 122
"Nocturn," 186
Notebooks, F. T.'s, 27, 227; _quoted_, 8, 12, 13, 18, 64, 78, 142, 175, 178, 188, 208, 228, 276-7, 283, 303-4
Nowlan, Fr., 26 _n._
Noyes, Mr. Alfred, 269
Nuns of the Cross and Passion, 6
Nyren, 43
ODES, occasional, 321, 332-4
Ode to the Setting Sun, 95, 95 _n._, 124-5, 127, 137 _n._, 176, 201, 211-12
"Old Fogey, An," (Andrew Lang, _soi-disant_), 136
Old Trafford cricket-ground, 39, 43
Opera, the, 46
Opium, F. T. and, 3, 46, 48-9, 51-3, 56-8, 63, 83, 87, 94-6, 104, 123, 163, 254-5, 321
"Orient Ode," 192, 201, 201 _n._, 210, 222, 238
Origen, 223
Orpen, Mr., 327
Ostade, 254
O'Sullivan, Mr. Vincent, 136, 252
Outcasts, 63-4, 74, 81-4
Owens College, Manchester, 35-6, 46, 54
Oxford Street, 61, 70, 274
PADDINGTON, 65, 274
Paganism, 125, 205, 228
"Paganism, Old and New," 85-7, 92, 125, 268
Pain, 69, 129, 294, 295
Palace Court, Kensington, F. T. at, 24, 68, 104, 117, 123, 271, 274, 284 _n._
_Pall Mall Gazette_, 138, 146, 241
Pan, 29-30, 124
Pantasaph, F. T. at, 24, 128-9, 131-2, 143-6, 148-9, 177, 180-97, 230, 233-236, 238-9
Pantheism, 205
Panton Street, 62, 71, 74-5
"Passion of Mary, The," 46 _n._, 87, 88, 92, 124
Passion, The, 6, 288
Parodies, 154, 331
Patmore, Coventry, 130, 143, 275, 282, 328; F. T.'s friendship with, 146, 148-9, 189-90, 224, 233-6, 250, 312; F. T.'s affinities with, 144-5, 174, 192-3, 220-1, 223, 267; "irregular" metre of, 176-8, 193, 220; quoted, 83-4, 139, 146-8, 164, 190-1, 198, 200, 201, 209, 220, 222, 266, 306 _n._, 312, 317; _The Poetry of Pathos and Delight_, 234; _Religio Poetæ_, 189, 191-2; _Rod, Root and Flower_, 149, 192, 201, 220, 227; translation of St. Bernard, 191; _The Unknown Eros_, 181, 191, 222, 238; letters to, 191-3, 195, 233, 236, 238; letters from, 149, 194, 197, 221, 233
Patmore, Henry, 21
Paul, St., 220, 223
Perry, Fr. Stephen, 124, 126
Phillips, Fr. G. E., 16
Phillips, Mr. Stephen, 175
Pickpocket Hall, 187
Pico della Mirandola, 204
Pile, Mr., 274-5
Plagiarism, 168
Plevna, siege of, 9
Poe, 178
_Poems_ (1893), 122, 129, 135-48, 158, 170, 238, 243, 341
"Poet breaking Silence, To a," 126, 133
"Poets as Prose Writers," 255, 316
Politics, 335, 339
Pope, 229, 272
"Poppy, The," 118, 341
Portiuncula, the, 185
Poverty, fair and foul, 77-8 _n._, 181, 284-5
Prayer, 73, 84, 104, 280, 286, 287 _n._
Premonstratensians, 95
Preston, 1, 5
Priesthood, F. T. and the, 5, 31-2, 33, 73
Prison, 64, 258
Probyn, Miss May, 85, 116
Prose, F. T.'s, 97-8, 135, 149, 177, 206, 267, 310, 312
Puns, 13, 326
QUANTITY, 176
Quiller-Couch, Sir A. T., 153, 241
RABELAIS, 64
Railton, Sergeant, 19
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 48, 156, 256
Ranjitsinhji, Prince, 42
_Realm, The_, 141, 146
Reformation, the, 12
Refuges, 65
Religion, 30, 31, 33, 34. _See_ Catholicism, and Mysticism
Rendall, Mr. Vernon, letters to F. T., 336
"Renegade Poet on the Poet, A," 302
Reserve, F. T.'s, 7, 18, 32, 35, 74, 90, 297
"Retrospect" ("Sight and Insight"), 184, 214
_Review of Reviews_, 106
Reviews by F. T., 121, 124, 156-7, 168, 171, 175, 253-5, 260, 269
"Rhodes, Cecil, Ode on," 255-6, 335
Rhyl, 185
Richardson, Fr., 46 _n._
Richardson, Mrs. Margaret, _née_ Thompson (the poet's sister), 1, 128, 341
Roger Bacon Society, The, 181, 183
Rook, Mr. Clarence, 253
Rossetti, Christina, 209, 224
Rossetti, D. G., _quoted_, 65 _n._, 82, 87; F. T.'s reading of, 161, 165, 268; other references, 127, 136, 154, 156, 164, 224, 239, 318
Rothschild, 67-8
_Rowton House Rhymes_, 93
Ruskin, 127
S., F., 25
St. Beuno's College, 185
_St. James's Gazette_, 135, 140, 145, 170
St. John's Wood, 45
_Saturday Review_, 146, 154, 233, 239
Salle, Blessed J. B. de la, 80
"Saul," an unfinished drama, 338
Scholarship, F. T.'s, 26 _n._, 27, 35
Science, 36, 196, 237-8
_Scots Observer_, 126, 262
Scott, 10, 11
Sea, the, 12-13
Seaman, Mr. Owen, 269
Seeley's (Mr. H. C.), _Dragons of the Air_, 157
_Selected Poems_ (1908), 247
Self-appraisements, F. T.'s, 98, 131, 136, 158, 187, 306
Self-revelation in F. T.'s poetry, 103, 148
Selous, F. C., illustrations to Shakespeare, 11, 38
Seneca, 300
"Sere of the Leaf, The," 102-3, 302
Serendipity Shop, the, 286, 329
Set-worship, 194, 196
Seventeenth Century, 165
Shakespeare, 271; F. T.'s early reading of, 6, 10-12, 38; his metre, 177; his diction, 154-5; quotations from, or other allusions to, by F. T., 85, 112-13, 117, 133, 175, 196, 238; F. T. compared with, 138, 143, 150, 168, 244
Sharp, William, 121, 124
"She, the unknown," 73, 84
Sheehan, Canon Patrick, 143
_Sheffield Daily Telegraph_, 240
Shelley, F. T's reading of, 87, 92, 96, 161, 164; F. T. on, 206, 260; Essay on, 96-100; Essay on Shelley, _quoted_, 5-6, 17-18, 98, 217, 219; F. T.'s "Shelley" poem, 126, 128; his "Shelley" selection, 100 _n._; F. T. compared with, 143, 150, 165, 167, 243, 262
Shelters, 65
Shore, Mr. W. Teignmouth, 335
Shore, Miss, 261
Shorter, Mrs. Dora Sigerson, 269
"Sight and Insight," 184, 198
Silence ("my familiar"), 7, 35, 58, 297
Simile and metaphor, 151
Simplicity, F. T.'s personal, 185, 187
"Sir Francis," 119
_Sister Songs_, its writing, 104-6, 152; its reception, 136, 141, 145, 154, 243-244; Meredith's epithet, 247; Wilde's appreciation, 252; F. T.'s feeling for it, 304; its actuality, 273; autobiographical, 81, 148, 168
Skating, 114
Smithfield Market, 117
Snead-Cox, Mr. J. G., 85, 120
Snowdon, 185
Socialism, 110 _n._
Socrates, 223
Solomon, Simeon, 323
"Song of the Hours," 95 _n._, 125
Sonnets, 73, 126
South African War, 9
South Kensington Museum, 105
Southampton Row, 71, 74
Southwater, 159, 349
Southwell, 167
_Speaker, The_, 140, 153, 240, 241
Spenser, 155, 163
Stalybridge, 39, 144
_Standard Book of British Poetry_, 74
_Star, The_, 145
Stead, W. T., 106-7
Stephanon, Lamente forre, 28-9
Stevenson, R. L., 165, 170, 297, 302
Storrington, 95-6, 111
Strand, the, 24, 71 _n._, 163, 278
Suckling, 165
Sun, the, and sun-worship, 210-12, 229, 238, 272-3
Sunrises and Sunsets, 131, 161, 290
Sussex, 346
Sutherland, the Duchess of, 252
Swedenborg, 206-7, 271
Swinburne, F. T's reading of, 97, 265, 268; F. T. on, 126, 178-9, 266
"Sylvia," 8, 148, 151, 349
Symons, Arthur, 144-6, 198-9, 269
Symbolism, 193-6, 211, 215, 218
_Tablet, The_, 99, 125, 126, 137 _n._, 138
"Tancred, Francis" (pseudonym of F. T.), 106
Tate, Dr., President of Ushaw, 26, 32
Taylor, Jeremy, 156
Tennyson, 101, 120, 179 _n._, 230, 260
Terence, 299
Texts as stimulants, 32, 68, 325-6
Thames Embankment, 24, 64, 192, 278
Theresa, St., 146
Thomas à Kempis, 225-6, 243, 283
Thomas, Mr. Edward, 198
Thomas of Celano, 181
Thompson, Dr. Charles (F. T.'s father), 1, 2, 4, 36, 54-60, 71, 107 _n._, 127, 144, 185-6
Thompson, Edward Healy (F. T.'s uncle), 2, 3, 14 _n._, 46 _n._, 58-9, 61, 68, 85 _n._, 124
Thompson family, the, 1-5
THOMPSON, FRANCIS JOSEPH, birth, pedigree, parentage, 1-4; his paternal uncles, 2, 3; other relatives, 4, 5; childhood, 6 _seq._; home-life, 7-14, 35, 54-5, 57-60, 74-5; early reading, 6, 10-12; at the seaside, 12, 13; cricket, 13, 39-45; at Ushaw, 15-21, 24-32; intention of the priesthood abandoned, 32-4; a medical student at Owens College, Manchester, 35-46; visits to London (1879 and 1882), 46, 54; illness, 46; reading de Quincey, 46; taking opium, 48-53, 56; fails in his exams., 54-6; love of music, 55; enlists, 56-7; flight from home, 57, to Manchester, 58, to London, 58, 61; odd jobs, 62-3; an outcast, 63-4; lodging-houses and refuges, 64-5; pieces of good-luck, 67-8; roofless nights, 69-70; with Mr. McMaster (the bootmaker), 70-75; a Christmas at home, 74-5; "in darkest London," 76-80; his "brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing," 81-4, 92; a meeting with the editor of _Merry England_, 85-90; the Meynell household, 90-2; contributes to _Merry England_, 92, 120-6; sent to a private hospital, 94; renunciation of opium, 94-5; at Storrington, 95; writing poetry, 95; the essay on Shelley, 96-100; return to London, 104; "The Hound of Heaven" and "Sister Songs," 104; article on General Booth's _In Darkest England_, 106-7; interview with Cardinal Manning, 107-8; journalism, 111-12, 117, 253-70; visits to Crawley, 112-13, 344-6; in Kensington Gardens, 114-15; at Friston, in Suffolk, 118-19; at Pantasaph, 128-33, 140, 143-48, 177, 180-97, 230-39; _Poems_ (1893), 128-48; _Sister Songs_ (1895), 141, 145, 149-50; friendship with Coventry Patmore, 139, 146-9, 189-97, 220-4, 233-4; his critics, 152-61; his congeners, 161-70, 174; his father's death, 185-186; his mysticism, 191-232; his attitude to Nature, 205-8; his religion, 224-7; his attitude to women, 227-32; a love-affair, 230; death of Patmore, 234-7; _New Poems_, 198, 201, 203, 236-43; return to London, 245; meeting with Meredith, 245-7; other friends, 247-52; writes for _The Academy_, 253-70, 334-6; criticisms on and meeting with W. E. Henley, 262-7; his catholic appreciation of modern literature, 265-6, 268-9; but preference for the older writers, 270-271; as a Londoner, 272-81, 284, 288; his poverty, 284-7; his loneliness, 291; bereft of song, 301-4, 306-7; was he happy or unhappy? 304-5, 329-33; his personal appearance, 327-8; writes for _The Athenæum_, 336; a return to opium, 342; visits to Sussex, 344-49; returns to London, and goes into hospital, 349; death, 350
Thompson, Francis Joseph, letters from, to Mother Austin (his sister Mary), 333; to Dr. Carroll, 97, 123; to Mr. Doubleday, 306 _n._; to Mr. C. L. Hind, 256-61; to Mr. William Hyde, 277; to Mrs. Meynell, 130, 132-3, 159, 177, 183, 188-9, 226, 297, 312-13; to Everard Meynell, 44, 159, 328-31, 345; to Wilfrid Meynell, 85, 88, 100, 103-5, 110 _n._, 112, 114-17, 129, 135, 145, 180, 183, 234-5, 238, 242, 250, 316-18, 334-5, 337-8; to Coventry Patmore, 191-3, 195, 233-4, 236, 238; to Mrs. Patmore, 234; to Mrs. Saleeby (_née_ Monica Meynell), 340-341; to Miss Agnes Tobin, 252
---- Letters to, from Father Anselm, 344-5; from Mr. W. Archer, 242; from Mother Austen (his sister Mary), 334; from Mr. J. L. Garvin, 332-3; from Mr. C. L. Hind, 264; from Mrs. Hamilton King, 132, 250; from Miss K. Douglas King, 250; from Mr. H. W. Massingham, 332, 336; from Mrs. Meynell, 129, 158; from Coventry Patmore, 149, 194, 197, 221, 233; from Mrs. Patmore, 237; from Mr. Vernon Rendall, 336; from W. T. Stead, 106; from Mrs. Tynan Hinkson, 102
Thompson, Helen (F. T. s sister), 1 _n._
Thompson, John Costall (F. T.'s uncle), 2, 3
Thompson, Margaret (F. T.'s sister), 1, 128
Thompson, Mary (F. T.'s sister), "Mother Austin," a nun, 1 _n._, 7, 8, 12-14, 39-4, 57, 59, 75, 127, 186, 287 _n._, 341; letter to, 333; letter from, 334
Thompson, Mary Turner, _née_ Morton (F. T.'s mother), 1, 4, 7, 10, 46, 48-9
Thorp, Mr., 259
_Times, The_, 240, 319, 320
Timidity, F. T.'s, 13, 15, 32, 265
"To my Godchild," 123, 137, 162, 273
Tobin, Miss Agnes, 252
Tolstoy, 109
"Tommy," 15, 19, 27
"Tom o' Bedlam, 65, 207
Toys, F. T.'s, 8, 98
Traherne, 74, 285, 288
Traill, Mr. H. D., 144-5, 149
Tregunter Road, Fulham, 46
"Twopenny Damn, The," 139
Tyburn, 275
Tynan, Katharine (Mrs. Hinkson), 85 _n._, 102, 122, 137 _n._, 209, 302; letters to F. T., 102
"ULTIMA," 306
University Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 318-9
Unpublished fragments of verse, 65, 81, 161, 188, 208, 213, 236, 270, 276-7, 280, 291-3, 295
Unpublished poems, 73-4, 77-8, 292-3, 296-7
Unpunctuality, F. T.'s, 9, 33, 72, 257, 264-5, 327
Unworldliness, F. T.'s, 5, 249, 287-8
Ushaw, F. T. at, 14, 34, 127
VAUGHAN, Henry, 198, 209, 288
Vaughan, Cardinal, 33, 99, 283
Verlaine, 320, 322
"Veteran of Heaven, The," 169, 195 _n._
Vienna Café, The, 280, 303
Vulgate, the, 171
WALES, F. T. in, 24, 128-32, 143-9, 177-97, 230-9
War, fears of a general, 193 _n._, 339-40
Wardour Street, 70
Watson, Mr. William, 136, 145, 259
Watts, Mr. Augustine, 21
Watts-Dunton, Mr. Theodore, 165
Waugh, Mr. Arthur, 258
_Weekly Register, The_, 111, 113, 124, 127, 135, 137
_Weekly Sun_, 141
Wells, Mr. H. G., 258
Westbourne Grove, 266, 284, 286
"Westminster Drolleries," 64
_Westminster Gazette_, 137, 154
Whiteing, Mr. Richard, 112, 241
Whiteside, Dr., Archbishop of Liverpool, 27
Whitten, Mr. Wilfred, 71 _n._, 257, 337; his reminiscences of F. T., 253-4, 280-1, 303, 307
Wilde, Oscar, 127, 252
Wilkinson, Fr. Adam, 20, 24
Winefride's Well, St., 185
Wiseman, Cardinal, 23, 99, 100
Woman, F. T. on, 227-9, 231
_Woman_ on F. T., 149
Wordsworth, _quoted_, 311; _quoted_ by F. T., 87, 159; points of contact with F. T., 160, 167, 183, 325; points of opposition, 205-6; F. T.'s article on, 260
Wormwood Scrubbs, 44
Wyndham, Mr. George, 100, 160, 256
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO. at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.
Varied hyphenation was retained.
Page 48, "fastastic" changed to "fantastic" (of the fantastic imagery)
Page 201-203, the final line on page 201 ends well before the edge of the right margin. The next line on page 202 has no indentation. A paragraph break was assumed and inserted at the line beginning (He came, even to the point)
Page 211, originally, footnote 48, a word in the original was missing its first two letters. "stness" was retained as no certain word could be inferred from the text.
Page 213, "Quæ coeli" changed to "Quae cæli" (Quae cæli pandis ostium!)
Page 236, "expresssed" changed to "expressed" (expressed in the obituary)
Page 328, "count" was left as printed for it was a quotation from a letter and may well have been used as printed in the original letter. (if character count for)
Page 354, "Portra it" changed to "Portrait" (Canon Law in _Her Portrait_)
Page 357, "M'Master" changed to "McMaster" to match usage in text (McMaster, Mr., 70-76)
Page 358, "Ranjitsinjhi" changed to "Ranjitsinhji" (Ranjitsinhji, Prince, 42)