SOURCE: "Henry Vaughan," in The Real Robert Louis Stevenson, and Other Critical Essays by Francis Thompson, edited by Rev. Terence L. Connolly, University Publishers Incorporated, 1959, pp. 87-9.

Thompson was one of the most important poets of the Catholic Revival in nineteenth-century English literature. Often compared to the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets, especially Richard Crashaw, he is best known for his poem "The Hound of Heaven" (1893), which displays his characteristic themes of spiritual struggle, redemption, and transcendent love. Like other writers of the fin de siècle period, Thompson wrote poetry and prose noted for rich verbal effects and a devotion to the values of aestheticism. In the following excerpt from a review (originally published in the Athenaeum in 1897) of E. K. Chambers's Poems of Henry Vaughan, he discusses Vaughan's derivitiveness as a poet, noting the inadequacy of comparisons with Wordsworth and Herbert.

The poems on which [Vaughan's] fame must...