free contract
Of virgin spousals, blissful beyond flight
Of modern thought, with great intention staunch,
Though unobliged until that binding pact.

To their infidelity to this contract he ascribes the subsequent
degradation of human love through sensuality; and all the sin and
selfishness thence deriving to our fallen race:

Whom nothing succour can
Until a heaven-caress'd and happier Eve
Be joined with some glad Saint
In like espousals, blessed upon Earth,
And she her fruit forth bring;

No numb chill-hearted shaken-witted thing,
'Plaining his little span.
But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,
The Son of God and Man.

The rationalistic objection to this suppression of what seems to be of
the essence or integrity of matrimony is obvious enough, and yet finds
many a retort even in the realm of nature, where the passage to a higher
grade of life so often means the stultifying of functions proper to the
lower. As to the pre-eminence of that state in which the spiritual
excellencies of marriage and virginity are combined, Catholic teaching
is quite clear and decided; in this, as in other points, Patmore's
untaught intuitions, and instincts--his _mens naturaliter
catholica_--had led him, whither the esoteric teaching of the Church had
led only the more appreciatively sympathetic of her disciples, from time
to time, as it were, up into that mountain of which St. Ambrose says:
"See, how He goes up with the Apostles and comes down to the crowds. For
how could the crowds see Christ save in a lowly spot? They do not follow
Him to the heights, nor rise to sublimities"--a notion altogether
congenial to Patmore's aristocratic bias in religion as in everything
else. Undoubtedly it was this mystical aspect of Catholic doctrine that
appealed to his whole personality, offering as it did an authoritative
approval, and suggesting an infinite realization, of those dreams that
were so sacred to him. As far as the logic of the affections goes, it
was for the sake of this that he held to all the rest; for indeed the
deeper Catholic truths are so internetted that he who seizes one, drags
all the rest along with it under pain of self-contradiction.

No one knew better than Patmore the infinite insufficiency of the
highest created symbols to equal the eternal realities which it is their
whole purpose to set forth; he fully realized that as the lowliest
beginnings of created love seem to moc