United States or Libya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Coventry Patmore was a rare example of a poet who laid down his pen deliberately, not merely as an artist in words, but as an artist in life, having, as he said in the memorable preface to the collected edition of his poems, completed that work which in his youth he had set before him.
Patmore were quite unapparent, taking form and voice in solitude; and here was a new singer, utterly unlike them all, pouring out his first notes with the precision and independence of the new-fledged thrush in the woodland chorus. In painting, the process was somewhat different.
In his old age Patmore wrote to Mr. Gosse a description of a visit he had paid, at the age of eighteen, to Leigh Hunt; and you will find the letter on page 32, vol. I, of Mr. Basil Champneys' biography of him. The circumstances had been most propitious.
"'The man that procrastinates struggles ever with ruin." Even so! So early did a heathen moralist learn the solemn fact that "only this once" ends in "there is no harm in it." Well does Mr. Coventry Patmore sing: In another place Epictetus warns us, however, not to be too easily discouraged in our attempts after good; and, above all, never to despair.
No one knew better than Patmore the infinite insufficiency of the highest created symbols to equal the eternal realities which it is their whole purpose to set forth; he fully realized that as the lowliest beginnings of created love seem to mock, rather than to foreshadow, the higher forms of which they are but the failure and botched essay, so the very highest conceivable, taken as more than a metaphor, were an irreverent parody of the Divine love for the human soul.
Men like Newman, men like Coventry Patmore, men who would have been mystics in any case, were driven back upon being much more extravagantly religious than they would have been in a religious country. Men like Huxley, men like Kingsley, men like most Victorian men, were equally driven back on being irreligious; that is, on doubting things which men's normal imagination does not necessarily doubt.
P.G. Patmore, in his recollections of Lamb in the Court Journal, 1835, afterwards reprinted, with some alterations, in his My Friends and Acquaintances, stated that Lamb laid aside his snuff-coloured suit in favour of black, after twenty years of the India House; and he suggests that Wordsworth's stanzas in "A Poet's Epitaph" was the cause:
Patmore seems to acknowledge her as the real "Angel in the House," although he says she herself ignores all connection with the poem. It is well for her to do so, and for her husband to feel that the character is her real portrait; and both, I suppose, are right.
I should say, roughly, that in ten minutes the young man would be strung up to the right pitch, and that more than twenty minutes would be too much. It is important that expectancy shall have worked on him to the full, but it is still more important that his mood shall not have been chafed to impatience. The danger of over-long delay is well exemplified in the sad case of young Coventry Patmore.
Madame Gigi, the young wife of the old Bohemian minister, had spoken of it only to the diplomatic set; Miss Patmore Green had been as silent as death, except in her own rather large family, and Lady George had hardly told anybody, except her father. But, nevertheless, the secret had escaped, and great efforts had been made to secure invitations.
Word Of The Day