ver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten time, we are
free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to liberal verse the laws
of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-marking verse (we are, of
course, not considering verse set to music, and thus compelled into the
musical time). Liberal verse, dramatic, narrative, meditative, can
surely be bound by no time measures--if for no other reason, for this:
that to prescribe pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed.
Granting, however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the
irregular metre of _The Unknown Eros_ is happily used except for the
large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called. _Lycidas_,
the _Mrs. 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. A more lovely dignity of extension and restriction, a more
touching sweetness of simple and frequent rhyme, a truer impetus of pulse
and impulse, English verse could hardly yield than are to be found in his
versification. And what movement of words has ever expressed flight,
distance, mystery, and wonderful approach, as they are expressed in a
celestial line--the eighth in the ode _To the Unknown Eros_? When
we are sensible of a metrical cheek it is in this way: To the English ear
the heroic line is the unit of metre, and when two lines of various
length undesignedly add together to form a heroic line, they have to be
separated with something of a jerk. And this adding--as, for instance,
of a line of four syllables preceding or following one of six--occurs now
and then, and even in such a masterly measure of music as _A Farewell_.
It is as when a sail suddenly flaps windless in the fetching about of a
boat. In _The Angel in the House_, and other earlier poems, Mr.
Coventry Patmore used the octosyllabic stanza perfectly, inasmuch as he
never left it either heavily or thinly packed. Moreover those first
poems had a composure which was the prelude to the peace of the Odes. And
even in his slightest work he proves himself the master--that is, the
owner--of words that, owned by him, are unprofaned, are as though they
had never been profaned; the capturer of an art so quick and close that
it is the voice less of a poet than of the very Muse.

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