That I may be enabled to write my poetry from immediate perception
of the truth and delight of love at once divine and human, and that
all events may so happen as shall best advance this my chief work
and probable means of working out my own salvation.

In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his
later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but
with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the
burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of
love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so
incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man,
throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two'
which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a
satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he
came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any
one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they
were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever
did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to
perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be
fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the
seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be
the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven.

Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and
the _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the first
eighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlest
and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this
essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet
is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable
lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse,
which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most
difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic
and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to
handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in
his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making
the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than
extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in
1868, not merely was he