en with the same ardour and reluctance, and a
letter which he wrote to me from Lymington, dated August 7, 1894, in
answer to a suggestion that he should join some other writers in a
contemplated memorial to Walter Pater, is literally exact in its
statement of his own way of work, not only during his later life:

I should have liked to make one of the honourable company of
commentators upon Pater, were it not that the faculty of writing,
or, what amounts to the same thing, interest in writing, has quite
deserted me. Some accidental motive wind comes over me, once in a
year or so, and I find myself able to write half a dozen pages in
an hour or two: but all the rest of my time is hopelessly sterile.

To what was this curious difficulty or timidity in composition due? In
the case of the poetry, Mr. Gosse attributes it largely to the fact of a
poet of lyrical genius attempting to write only philosophical or
narrative poetry; and there is much truth in the suggestion. Nothing in
Patmore, except his genius, is so conspicuous as his limitations.
Herrick, we may remember from his essay on Mrs. Meynell, seemed to him
but 'a splendid insect'; Keats, we learn from Mr. Champneys' life,
seemed to him 'to be greatly deficient in first-rate imaginative power';
Shelley 'is all unsubstantial splendour, like the transformation scene
of a pantomime, or the silvered globes hung up in a gin-palace'; Blake
is 'nearly all utter rubbish, with here and there not so much a gleam as
a trick of genius.' All this, when he said it, had a queer kind of
delightfulness, and, to those able to understand him, never seemed, as
it might have seemed in any one else, mere arrogant bad taste, but a
necessary part of a very narrow and very intense nature. Although
Patmore was quite ready to give his opinion on any subject, whether on
'Wagner, the musical impostor,' or on 'the grinning woman, in every
canvas of Leonardo,' he was singularly lacking in the critical faculty,
even in regard to his own art; and this was because, in his own art, he
was a poet of one idea and of one metre. He did marvellous things with
that one idea and that one metre, but he saw nothing beyond them; all
thought must be brought into relation with nuptial love, or it was of no
interest to him, and the iambic metre must do everything that poetry
need concern itself about doing.

In a memorandum for prayer made in 1861, we read this petition: