"The Life of Francis Thompson" by Everard Meynell. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
Оглавление
Everard Meynell. The Life of Francis Thompson
The Life of Francis Thompson
Table of Contents
Illustrations
The Life of Francis Thompson
CHAPTER I: THE CHILD
CHAPTER II: THE BOY
CHAPTER III: MANCHESTER AND MEDICINE
CHAPTER IV: LONDON STREETS
CHAPTER V: THE DISCOVERY
CHAPTER VI: LITERARY BEGINNINGS
CHAPTER VII: "POEMS"
CHAPTER VIII: OF WORDS; OF ORIGINS; OF METRE
CHAPTER IX: AT MONASTERY GATES
CHAPTER X: MYSTICISM AND IMAGINATION
CHAPTER XI: PATMORE'S DEATH AND "NEW POEMS"
CHAPTER XII: FRIENDS AND OPINIONS
CHAPTER XIII: THE LONDONER
CHAPTER XIV: COMMUNION AND EXCOMMUNION
CHAPTER XV: CHARACTERISTICS
CHAPTER XVI: THE CLOSING YEARS
CHAPTER XVII: LAST THINGS
Index
FOOTNOTES:
Отрывок из книги
Everard Meynell
Published by Good Press, 2019
.....
Those were years of anything but the making of a doctor. To have conformed so little to the style of the medical student promised little for the expected practitioner. He would even leave his father's reputable doorstep with untied laces, dragging their length on the pavement past the windows of curious and critical neighbours. He did not work, and his idleness was all unlike the idleness proper to his class. He read poetry in the public library. One sort of idleness, an idleness that gave business to his thoughts for all his life, took him to the museums and galleries. In an essay of the 'nineties he remembers
"The statue which thralled my youth in a passion such as feminine mortality was skill-less to instigate. Nor at this let any boggle; for she was a goddess. Statue I have called her; but indeed she was a bust, a head, a face—and who that saw that face could have thought to regard further? She stood nameless in the gallery of sculptural casts which she strangely deigned to inhabit; but I have since learned that men call her the Vatican Melpomene. Rightly stood she nameless, for Melpomene she never was: never went words of hers from bronzèd lyre in tragic order; never through her enspelled lips moaned any syllables of woe. Rather, with her leaf-twined locks, she seems some strayed Bacchante, indissolubly filmed in secular reverie. The expression which gave her divinity resistless I have always suspected for an accident of the cast; since in frequent engravings of her prototype I never met any such aspect. The secret of this indecipherable significance, I slowly discerned, lurked in the singularly diverse set of the two corners of the mouth; so that her profile wholly shifted its meaning according as it was viewed from the right or left. In one corner of her mouth the little languorous firstling of a smile had gone to sleep; as if she had fallen a-dream, and forgotten that it was there. The other had drooped, as of its own listless weight, into a something which guessed at sadness; guessed, but so as indolent lids are easily grieved by the prick of the slate-blue dawn. And on the full countenance these two expressions blended to a single expression inexpressible; as if pensiveness had played the Maenad, and now her arms grew heavy under the cymbals. Thither each evening, as twilight fell, I stole to meditate and worship the baffling mysteries of her meaning: as twilight fell, and the blank noon surceased arrest upon her life, and in the vaguening countenance the eyes broke out from their day-long ambuscade. Eyes of violet blue, drowsed-amorous, which surveyed me not, but looked ever beyond, where a spell enfixed them,
