How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more often than not wins you to
but a slow participation. Perhaps because some thrust of his has left
you still tremulous.
But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine
allusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is passionate has much of
the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling, as there is
no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies. The love of the
great for the small is the passionate love; the upward love hesitates and
is fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked that the day of his ecstasy might
be shortened; Imogen, the wife of all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the
child is 'fretted with sallies of his mothers kisses.' It might be
drawing an image too insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.
The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion so
authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be otherwise
than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of significance that gives
the reader a shock of appreciation. This is always so in those simplest
odes which we have taken as the heart of the author's work. Without such
wonderful rightness, simplicity of course is impossible. Nor is that
beautiful precision less in passages of description, such as the
landscape lines in _Amelia_ and elsewhere.
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