ly different.
The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with the
poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of
mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like
Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular
lyrical verse.

Patmore's endeavour, in _The Unknown Eros_, is certainly towards a form
of _vers libre_, but it is directed only towards the variation of the
normal pause in the normal English metre, the iambic 'common time,' and
is therefore as strictly tied by law as a metre can possibly be when it
ceases to be wholly regular. Verse literally 'free,' as it is being
attempted in the present day in France, every measure being mingled, and
the disentangling of them left wholly to the ear of the reader, has
indeed been attempted by great metrists in many ages, but for the most
part only very rarely and with extreme caution. The warning, so far, of
all these failures, or momentary half-successes, is to be seen in the
most monstrous and magnificent failure of the nineteenth century, the
_Leaves of Grass_ of Walt Whitman. Patmore realised that without law
there can be no order, and thus no life; for life is the result of a
harmony between opposites. For him, cramped as he had been by a
voluntary respect for far more than the letter of the law, the discovery
of a freer mode of speech was of incalculable advantage. It removed from
him all temptation to that 'cleverness' which Mr. Gosse rightly finds in
the handling of 'the accidents of civilised life,' the unfortunate part
of his subject-matter in _The Angel in the House_; it allowed him to
abandon himself to the poetic ecstasy, which in him was almost of the
same nature as philosophy, without translating it downward into the
terms of popular apprehension; it gave him a choice, formal, yet
flexible means of expression for his uninterrupted contemplation of
divine things.

1906.

SAROJINI NAIDU

It was at my persuasion that _The Golden Threshold_ was published. The
earliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer
was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when
she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those
two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their
own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Your
letter made me very proud and very sad,' she wrote. 'Is it