es but rehearse the action of the union of God with humanity--that
there is no essential man save Christ, and no essential woman except the
soul of mankind. When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the
phrase of human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the
truths of the love of God. The thought grows gay in the three _Psyche_
odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being somewhat reluctant.
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. The words are used to the
uttermost yet with composure. And a certain justness of utterance
increases the provocation of what we take leave to call unjust thought in
the few poems that proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social,
literary. The poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their
subjects--we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using
the most modern of adjectives--and call them topical. Here assuredly
there is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself with so
little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--reluctance.

If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with minim, or
crochet, or qua