e feeling with which prayer and love and honour should
be offered to Him ... _She_ showed me what that relationship
involves of heavenly submission and spotless passionate
loyalty.[14]

He believed that sex is a relationship at the base of all things natural
and divine;

Nature, with endless being rife,
Parts each thing into "him" and "her"
And, in the arithmetic of life,
The smallest unit is a pair.[15]

This division into two and reconciliation into one, this clash of forces
resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously
reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real
apprehension of God, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his
triple Personality in one Being.

Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in
animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its
being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of
expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single
entity but in virtue of its being thesis, antithesis, and synthesis
and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of sex, the
masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten sex
spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of sex,
but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the
fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace."

The essay from which this passage is taken, _The Bow set in the Cloud_,
together with _The Precursor_, give in full detail an exposition of this
belief of Patmore's, which was for him "_the burning heart of the
Universe_."

Female and male God made the man;
His image is the whole, not half;
And in our love we dimly scan
The love which is between Himself.[16]

God he conceived of as the great masculine positive force, the soul as
the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the
"mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source
of all life and joy.

This profound and very difficult theme is treated by Patmore in a manner
at once austere and passionate in the exquisite little preludes to the
_Angel in the House_, and more especially in the odes, which stand alone
in nineteenth-century poetry for poignancy of feeling and depth of
spiritual passion. They are the highest expression of "erotic
mysticism"[17] in English; a marvell