al subject of
_all_ true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto, an
"ideal" and not a reality has been the subject, more
or less.

Taking the "Angel of the House" as representing the earlier, and the
"Odes" the later stage of the development which this theme received
under his hands, it seems as though he passes from the idealization and
apotheosis of married love to the conception of it as being in its
highest form, not merely the richest symbol, but even the most
efficacious sacrament of the mystical union between God and the soul. He
is well aware--though not fully at first--that these conceptions were
familiar to St. Bernard and many a Catholic mystic; it was for the
poetic apprehension and expression of them that he claimed originality;
or, at least, for their unification and systematic development. "That
his apprehensions were based generally--almost exclusively, on the
fundamental idea of nuptial love must," as Mr. Champneys says, "be
admitted." This was the governing category of his mind; the mould into
which all dualities naturally fell; it was to his philosophy what love
and hate, light and dark, form and matter, motion and atoms, have been
to others.

It was, at all events, the predominance of this conception
which bound together his whole life's work,
rendering coherent and individualizing all which he
thought, wrote, or uttered, and those who study
Patmore without this key are little likely to understand
him.

And it is the persistent and not always sufficiently restrained use of
this category that made much of his writing just a trifle shocking to
sensitive minds.

These latter will have "closed his works far too promptly to discover
that far from gainsaying the Catholic instinct which prefers virginity
to marriage" (not a strictly accurate statement) he makes virginity a
condition of the idealized marriage-relation, and finds its realization
in her who was at once matron and virgin. Following the fragmentary
hints to be found here and there in patristic and mystical theology, he
assumes that virgin-spousals and virgin-birth were to have been the law
in that Paradise from which man lapsed back into natural conditions
through sin; that in the case of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph the
paradisaic law was but resumed in this respect. Accordingly, he writes
of Adam and Eve in "The Contract,"

Thus the first Eve
With much enamoured Adam did enact
Their mutual