stall of
old books in the Sierpes, and began to read, and to try to render in
English, that extraordinary verse which remains, with that of S. Teresa,
the finest lyrical verse which Spain has produced, I understood how much
the mystic of the prose and the poet of _The Unknown Eros_ owed to the
_Noche Escura_ and the _Llama de Amor Viva_. He spoke of the Catholic
mystics like an explorer who has returned from the perils of far
countries, with a remembering delight which he can share with few.

If Mr. Gosse is anywhere in his book unjust to Patmore it is in speaking
of the later books of prose, the _Religio Poetae_ and _The Rod, the
Root, and the Flower_, some parts of which seem to him 'not very
important except as extending our knowledge of' Patmore's 'mind, and as
giving us a curious collection of the raw material of his poetry.' To
this I can only reply in some words which I used in writing of the
_Religio Poetae_, and affirm with an emphasis which I only wish to
strengthen, that, here and everywhere, and never more than in the
exquisite passage which Mr. Gosse only quotes to depreciate, the prose
of Patmore is the prose of a poet; not prose 'incompletely executed,'
and aspiring after the 'nobler order' of poetry, but adequate and
achieved prose, of a very rare kind. Thought, in him, is of the very
substance of poetry, and is sustained throughout at almost the lyrical
pitch. There is, in these essays, a rarefied air as of the mountain-tops
of meditation; and the spirit of their sometimes remote contemplation is
always in one sense, as Pater has justly said of Wordsworth,
impassioned. Only in the finest of his poems has he surpassed these
pages of chill and ecstatic prose.

But if Patmore spoke, as he wrote, of these difficult things as a
traveller speaks of the countries from which he has returned, when he
spoke of poetry it was like one who speaks of his native country. At
first I found it a little difficult to accustom myself to his permanent
mental attitude there, with his own implied or stated pre-eminence
(Tennyson and Barnes on the lower slopes, Browning vaguely in sight, the
rest of his contemporaries nowhere), but, after all, there was an
undisguised simplicity in it, which was better, because franker, than
the more customary 'pride that apes humility,' or the still baser
affectation of indifference. A man of genius, whose genius, like
Patmore's, is of an intense and narrow kind, cannot possibly do justice
t