The poems as they appeared in _Merry England_ or in journals quoting _Merry England_ found notable adherents. "The Making of Viola" was re-printed by Miss Katharine Tynan in 1892 in a Dublin paper, to which she contributed a London letter, and it was in that form that Mr. Garvin, to be later the poet's inspiring critic and friend, first chanced upon Thompson. A leader-writer on the _Newcastle Daily Chronicle_, he found that "up in the north here, if one has a passion for the finer letters, one must possess his insulated soul in silence." After reading "The Making of Viola" ("I cannot tell you," he wrote to W. M. from Newcastle, "what I think of the angelic ingenuousness of that poem; it exercised over me an instant fascination from which I never shall escape") he heard nothing more of Thompson till the publication of _Poems_. His welcome of that volume is quoted in another page. _Poems_ came to him while he was writing "leaders," and his brother, already Thompson-mad, declaimed "The Hound of Heaven" beside a desk where politics and poetry have fought hotly for the field, and where they have been known to embrace as unexpectedly as Botticelli's angels and shepherds. "I was obdurate and a little irritated when these 'snatches of Uranian antiphon' broke grandly through my comments on the Russo-German commercial treaty, or Professor Garner's theories about the garrulous gorilla." One marvels that the garrulous gorilla leader was perfectly intelligible in next morning's _Chronicle_. Mr. Garvin's readers could not guess that Thompson's poems were already beginning "to swarm in his head like bees." He contrives to write about treaties, or make them, so that half the world knows nothing of the winged muse at his elbow. She herself may have sometimes thought him obdurate, for she has never yet succeeded in marring a "leader." Letters from Mr. Garvin, written ten years later, were kept among Francis's few valued possessions. The two were to meet at Palace Court in 1894 and at many other dates.
My father had also the satisfaction of printing several of the poems ("Daisy, A Song of Youth and Age" and "To my Godchild") in his anthology, _The Child set in the Midst, by Modern Poets_, the first book in which anything of F. T.'s had appeared. Thus to W. M. in his preface fell the task of writing of him as one "who has eluded fame as long as Shelley did, but cannot elude it longer. To most readers the poems will come as the revelation of a new personality in poetry, the last discovered of the Immortals."