be above price, even gauged by the rude measure
of rarity. Transcendent simplicity could not possibly be habitual. Man
lives within garments and veils, and art is chiefly concerned with making
mysteries of these for the loveliness of his life; when they are rent
asunder it is impossible not to be aware that an overwhelming human
emotion has been in action. Thus _Departure_, _If I were Dead_,
_A Farewell_, _Eurydice_, _The Toys_, _St. Valentine's
Day_--though here there is in the exquisite imaginative play a
mitigation of the bare vitality of feeling--group themselves apart as the
innermost of the poet's achievements.

Second to these come the Odes that have splendid thought in great images,
and display--rather than, as do the poems first glanced at, betray--the
beauties of poetic art. Emotion is here, too, and in shocks and throes,
never frantic when almost intolerable. It is mortal pathos. If any
other poet has filled a cup with a draught so unalloyed, we do not know
it. Love and sorrow are pure in _The Unknown Eros_; and its author
has not refused even the cup of terror. Against love often, against
sorrow nearly always, against fear always, men of sensibility
instantaneously guard the quick of their hearts. It is only the approach
of the pang that they will endure; from the pang itself, dividing soul
and spirit, a man who is conscious of a profound capacity for passion
defends himself in the twinkling of an eye. But through nearly the whole
of Coventry Patmore's poetry there is an endurance of the mortal touch.
Nay, more, he has the endurance of the immortal touch. That is, his
capacity for all the things that men elude for their greatness is more
than the capacity of other men. He endures therefore what they could but
will not endure and, besides this, degrees that they cannot apprehend.
Thus, to have studied _The Unknown Eros_ is to have had a certain
experience--at least the impassioned experience of a compassion; but it
is also to have recognised a soul beyond our compassion.

What some of the Odes have to sing of, their author does not insist upon
our knowing. He leaves more liberty for a well-intentioned reader's
error than makes for peace and recollection of mind in reading. That the
general purpose of the poems is obscure is inevitable. It has the
obscurity of profound clear waters. What the poet chiefly secures to us
is the understanding that love and its bonds, its bestowal and reception,
do