"From the higher standpoint I have gained, I think, in art and chastity of style; but have greatly lost in fire and glow. 'Tis time that I was silent. This book carries me quite as far as my dwindling strength will allow; and if I wrote further in poetry, I should write down my own fame."
_New Poems_ found the critics, in 1897, more hostile than before. Perhaps the _Saturday Review_ was the most severe:--
"He has been, from the first, unfortunate in being shielded from sincere criticism. He has been persuaded by his friends that he is a genius, divinely inspired, whose wildest utterances are his best. . . . In no poet of reputation is it (order) more strikingly absent than in Mr. Thompson. Beautiful fancy, sonorous and picturesque diction we find here, indeed, but no motive power. These odes begin on one key, are shifted to another, take up a fresh subject, drop it, and, at length, as if merely wearied of their aimless flight, drop suddenly, and cease in the air."
"These, and the rest, are nonsense-verses," the same writer says of "The Mistress of Vision," but finds elsewhere "a touch of genuine sublimity." The former _British Review_ picks out several examples of "his barbarous jargon" (a phrase also used by Horne of Meredith's "Song of Queen Theodolinda") and prescribes for him Ben Jonson's pill for the poetaster and that he be shaken free of "the praises with which his friends now mislead him." The _Literary World_ also sees need of doctoring, saying, "Nothing can be stronger than his language, nothing weaker than the impression it leaves on the mind. . . . It is like a dictionary of obsolete English suffering from a fierce fit of delirium tremens." _The Critic_, of New York, takes Thompson's ignorance of religion and symbolism for granted; the _Times_ finds fault with both his poetry and Catholicism; the _Morning Post_ is unfavourable; the _Daily Chronicle_, the _Speaker_, and the _Guardian_ all begin severely but leave scolding before they ended to give generous praise. The _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_ was handsome. The poet's obscurity was the chief cause of displeasure, since from thinking a man's meanings difficult it is fatally easy to go on to say he is meaningless. The case they make is startlingly good; one reaches for one's Thompson from the shelves to see if he is in truth so great as one had thought before spending an hour with his early critics. If one pauses before quoting them, it is not for fear of dealing unkindly with them. They are convincing; only the Thompson of scraps they condemn is not the Thompson we know by the book. When the _Pall Mall_ says