wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even
within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza
of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was
usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights
and sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of three
long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds
with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this
rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the
balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing
quite such lines as:

One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size,
Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.

All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm,
seems to have left him suddenly, without warning.

And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having
had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of
1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metre
is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how
liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is
purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of
prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he
finds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development
in metre so spiritually significant.

In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which
I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between
_The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the difference
between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry
alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of
1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry
ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation,
or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this
new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and
not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully
clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse
states was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley,
but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his
prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genui