Of the primordial heat;
Till, unto view of me and thee,
Lost the intense life be,
Or ludicrously display’d, by force
Of distance, as a soaring eagle, or a horse
On far-off hillside shown,
May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.”
To those who read these lines carefully it will not be necessary to say that the author is a Catholic. His name, though modestly withheld from the present volume, is not unknown. It is many years ago since Coventry Patmore sang his sweet love-songs, The Betrothal and The Espousals.
They were received favorably enough by the critics—far more favorably, indeed, than have been many higher and greater poems on their first appearance: Keats’ Endymion, for instance. Then a strange silence struck the poet, and he was dumb.
If the present volume is the growth of all these silent years, Mr. Patmore has not suffered by his solitude. Between his earlier work and the present there is no comparison. Indeed, it takes a very careful reading of the first to detect therein the germ of the strong growth and most beautiful flower that compel admiration to-day. Those were nothing more than the story, told with all the fond minuteness of a gentle, ardent, intelligent, and chivalrous young lover, of his first true love; of the flowery paths and pleasant ways that led up to it; of the gracious nothings that make that time so sweet and ever memorable to the lovers; the lone communings, the tremulous doubts, the bitter-sweet emotions, the sun and shade, the laughing April showers that weave Love’s many-colored web and make a brief paradise for the new Adam and Eve, with no serpent lurking in the grass—all this is told delightfully and with delight. The verse is sweet and pleasant and flowing as the subject; but it is a song to while away a drowsy hour, not to cause us to halt and listen in the busy march and fierce strife of life. We glance over them with lazy pleasure as we watch the gambols of children in the sun.