ne poet, Drummond of
Hawthornden.

Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable
affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is
unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form
of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said,

If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no
typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but
metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose
brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most
of his measures;

and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference
between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the
contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in
Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not
surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse
of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of
his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The
pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause
for breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; but
they _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his
verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the
couplets of the _Davideis_.

Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says
Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the
true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early
Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and
especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for
examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form.

Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit,
there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of
Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform,
length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement
with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the
_Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for their
refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever
further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and
that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essential