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Anne Killigrew, the Intimations, and Emerson's Threnody, considered merely for their versification, fulfil their laws so perfectly that they certainly move without checks as without haste. So with the graver Odes much in the majority of Mr. Coventry Patmore's series.
This is true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but not of their best passages, nor of such magnificent heroic verse as that of the close of "A Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the question of ease, we cannot have a better maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying that poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, its difficulties."
I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their imagery in a poem that without them would be insupportably close to spiritual facts; and because it seems to prove with what a yielding hand at play the poet of realities holds his symbols for a while.
When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the truths of the love of God. The thought grows gay in the three Psyche odes, or attempts a gaiety the reader at least being somewhat reluctant. How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to but a slow participation.
Orme, lived until 1892 in Bedford Park; the other lives in Coventry Patmore's "Angel in the House." When Ruskin, thirty years later, wrote of that doubtfully-received poem, that it was the "sweetest analysis we possess of quiet, modern, domestic feeling," few of his readers could have known all the grounds of his appreciation, or suspected the weight of meaning in the words.
On the other hand, one less intelligently sympathetic with the more spiritual side of Catholicism than Mr. Champneys, would have lacked the principal key to the interpretation of Patmore's highest aims and ideals, towards which the whole growth and movement of his mind was ever tending, and by which its successive stages of evolution are to be explained.
Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience of dreams. She seems to have undergone the inevitable dream of mourners the human dream of the Labyrinth, shall I call it? the uncertain spiritual journey in search of the waiting and sequestered dead, which is the obscure subject of the "Eurydice" of Coventry Patmore's Odes.
Even in England, the orthodox poet has not been nonexistent. Christina Rossetti portrays such an one in her autobiographical poetry. Jean Ingelow, in Letters of Life and Morning, offers most conventional religious advice to the young poet. And in Coventry Patmore's The Angel in the House, one finds as orthodox a poet as any that the eighteenth century could afford.
He was as eccentric and florid and Elizabethan as Browning; and often in moods and metres that even Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the first time he read Patmore's hint that the cosmos is a thing that God made huge only "to make dirt cheap"; just as nobody will ever forget the sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs.
Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there, only to be put to silence to silence of a kind that would be impossible were they less glorious are testimonies to the difference between sacrifice and waste. But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's work with praise of an infrequent mood?
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