of the doctrines, for having minimized their merits out of theological or moral bigotry. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia. Rendered into English Verse. Macmillan & Co., 1900. Agamemnon-A Tragedy: Taken from Aeschylus. Bernard Quaritch, 1876. Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald, ed. W. A. Wright. Macmillan & Co., 1889. 1 Bredfield Hall (Letters and Literary Remains). 2 Agamemnon, Chorus 4-5. 3 Ibid., Chorus 6-7. • To E. Fitzgerald (Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885). 5 Rubáiyát, stanzas 8-9 and 17-23. • Ibid., stanzas 27-8. • Ibid., stanzas 84-7. 7 Ibid., st. 64. Encyc. Brit., ed. ix, vol. xviii, 1884. Art. Omar Khayyám (H.E.). 10 Vide supra, Tennyson to Fitzgerald (Tiresias, &c.). COVENTRY PATMORE 1823-1896 As I read Coventry Patmore, I wonder if there be not a secret religion among educated women. Man would have no right to be surprised if they kept in their boudoirs, their schoolroom desks, their wardrobes, along with Jane Eyre and The Christian Year, copies of The Angel in the House, and Victories of Love. Before they go down in the morning, while they dress for dinner, after or before their evening prayer, they might well find time for a few verses, if not for a book. May there not be ladies' clubs at which he is regularly studied, Girton Extension lectures at which he is expounded? When men praise their Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, do they never hear Patmore's name whispered by feminine lips? True that he is seldom mentioned openly, and now less often than thirty years ago. It may merely be another proof of the adage that half of us know nothing of the way in which the other half live. I find it hard to credit that the one real poet who proclaimed the right divine of women to be adored no less after than before marriage, and more so as wives and mothers than as brides, has ceased to be habitually revered by their sex. Poetesses do not count, besides that they rarely are genuine woman-lovers. Until Coventry Patmore poets had been wont to end their worship as soon as the Altar steps were reached. As he boasts, it was reserved for him, last of all, to sing the first of themes. He traces it in a series of soft-sweet idylls, very fully from the wooing to the wedding-ring, and thence, in outline, rather shadowy, through happy years of nuptial and parental love. The husband-lover prays to be inspired as chronicler : Thou, Primal Love, who grantest wings Too simple and too sweet for words.1 His verse sufficiently proves that his petition was granted. With charming delicacy he describes the discovery, in Honoria Churchill-playing The Wedding March of Mendelssohn 2 of the girl whom he had known as a child six years before; the revelation to himself of his passion through a passing tremor at the thought of a possible rival; and its elevating effect: Whatever in her sight I'd seem 'Twould change her cheek to comprehend.3 Were his affection to be unreturned, he would be proud of it still : If fate Love's dear ambition mar, And load his breast with hopeless pain, And seem to blot out sun and star, Love, lost or won, is countless gain ; His sorrow boasts a secret bliss Which sorrow of itself beguiles, And Love in tears too noble is For pity, save of Love in smiles.4 For him it envelops the universe: spreading, in the eyes of the sleepless watcher, uncertain as yet of the issue of his suit, a grim pallor at dawn over The landscape, all made sharp and clear By stillness, as a face by death.5 A little later the blessed answer has been given; and the same landscape is transfigured: 'Twas when the spousal time of May Hangs all the hedge with bridal wreaths, Gives thanks for every breath it breathes ; Beneath the softly twinkling shade. So these were green and those were gold; In dim recesses hyacinths droop'd, And breadths of primrose lit the air, Which, wandering through the woodland, stoop'd And gather'd perfumes here and there; Upon the spray the squirrel swung, And careless songsters, six or seven, Sang lofty songs the leaves among, Fit for their only listener, Heaven. If there could be a drawback to the wooer's own ecstasy, it was caused by its completeness: She answering, own'd that she lov'd too. The avowal overwhelmed the victor with compassion, even shame, at his lady paramount's abdication of her throne: By that consenting scared and shock'd, Such change came o'er her mien and mood That I felt startled and half mock'd At winning what I had not woo'd. My queen was crouching at my side, All melted into tears like snow. Like a pet fawn by hunters hurt.7 My extracts will, I am afraid, have produced an impression that Coventry Patmore, like other minstrels of love, found, notwithstanding his protestations, a readier subject in the wooing than in wifehood. Whatever his design, that is true in fact of The Angel in the House; though even there lovely rays play over the showing Sweet stranger, whom I called my wife ; How light the touches are that kiss But the recorder would have been false to his own plan and principle had he closed his history with the wedding, or even the honeymoon. Naturally he should have continued it to and within the poet-bridegroom's pleasant house of The Hurst. He chose instead-more the pity-to assign the leading matrimonial parts in Victories of Love to a cousin, and undeclared adorer, of the heroine of the earlier volume-Frederick Graham-and his wife Jane, whom he had married to deaden a tormenting memory and regret. Though the second poem shares the general fate of sequels as a whole, it has virtues of its own, and at all events was, in default of Honoria for sole heroine, a necessity. In The Angel in the House the wife was a goddess born. She remains, if in the background, a goddess in Victories of Love, with her husband for vowed and loyal worshipper. The other, with none such in her train, least |