clear, silent waters, a few days, in the culmination of the heat,
bring forth translucent living creatures, many-shaped jelly-fish,

coloured like mother-of-pearl.
But without going so far from the landscape of daily life, it is in

agricultural Italy that the LITTLE LESS makes so undesignedly, and
as it were so inevitably, for beauty. The country that is formed

for use and purpose only is immeasurably the loveliest. What a
lesson in literature! How feelingly it persuades us that all except

a very little of the ornament of letters and of life makes the
dulness of the world. The tenderness of colour, the beauty of

series and perspective, and the variety of surface, produced by the
small culture of vegetables, are among the charms that come

unsought, and that are not to be found by seeking--are never to be
achieved if they are sought for their own sake. And another of the

delights of the useful laborious land is its vitality. The soil may
be thin and dry, but man's life is added to its own. He has

embanked the hill to make little platforms for the growth of wheat
in the light shadows of olive leaves. Thanks to the metayer land-

tenure, man's heart, as well as his strength, is given to the
ground, with his hope and his honour. Louis Blanc's 'point of

honour of industry' is a consciousimpulse--it is not too much to
say--with most of the Tuscan contadini; but as each effort they make

for their master they make also for the bread of their children, it
is no wonder that the land they cultivate has a look of life. But

in all colour, in all luxury, and in all that gives material for
picturesque English, this lovely scenery for food and wine and

raiment has that LITTLE LESS to which we desire to recall a
rhetorical world.

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE'S ODES
To most of the great poets no greater praise can be given than

praise of their imagery. Imagery is the natural language of their
poetry. Without a parable she hardly speaks. But undoubtedly there

is now and then a poet who touches the thing, not its likeness, too
vitally, too sensitively, for even such a pause as the verse makes

for love of the beautiful image. Those rare moments are simple, and
their simplicity makes one of the reader's keenest experiences.

Other simplicities may be achieved by lesser art, but this is
transcendent simplicity. There is nothing in the world more costly.

It vouches for the beauty which it transcends; it answer for the
riches it forbears; it implies the art which it fulfils. All

abundance ministers to it, though it is so single. And here we get
the sacrificial quality which is the well-kept secret of art at this

perfection. All the faculties of the poet are used for preparing
this naked greatness--are used and fruitfully spent and shed. The

loveliness that stands and waits on the simplicity of certain of Mr.
Coventry Patmore's Odes, the fervours and splendours that are there,

only to be put to silence--to silence of a kind that would be
impossible were they less glorious--are testimonies to the

difference between sacrifice and waste.
But does it seem less than reasonable to begin a review of a poet's

work with praise of an infrequent mood? Infrequent such a mood must
needs be, yet it is in a profound sense characteristic. To have

attained it once or twice is to have proved such gift and grace as a
true history of literature would show to 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 chieflyconcerned 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 profoundcapacity 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, does but rehearse the action

of the union of God with humanity--that there is no essential man
save Christ, and no essential woman except the soul of mankind.

When the singer of a Song of Songs seems to borrow the phrase of
human love, it is rather that human love had first borrowed the

truths of the love of God. The thought grows gay in the three
Psyche odes, or attempts a gaiety--the reader at least being

somewhat reluctant. How is it? Mr. Coventry Patmore's play more
often than not wins you to but a slow participation. Perhaps

because some thrust of his has left you still tremulous.
But the inequality of equal lovers, sung in these Odes with a Divine

allusion, is a most familiar truth. Love that is passionate has
much of the impulse of gravitation--gravitation that is not falling,

as there is no downfall in the precipitation of the sidereal skies.
The love of the great for the small is the passionate love; the

upward love hesitates and is fugitive. St. Francis Xavier asked
that the day of his ecstasy might be shortened; Imogen, the wife of

all poetry, 'prays forbearance;' the child is 'fretted with sallies
of his mothers kisses.' It might be drawing an image too

insistently to call this a centrifugal impulse.
The art that utters an intellectual action so courageous, an emotion

so authentic, as that of Mr. Coventry Patmore's poetry, cannot be
otherwise than consummate. Often the word has a fulness of

significance that gives the reader a shock of appreciation. This is
always so in those simplest odes which we have taken as the heart of

the author's work. Without such wonderful rightness, simplicity of
course is impossible. Nor is that beautiful precision less in

passages of description, such as the landscape lines in Amelia and
elsewhere. The words are used to the uttermost yet with composure.

And a certain justness of utterance increases the provocation of
what we take leave to call unjust thought in the few poems that

proclaim an intemperate scorn--political, social, literary. The
poems are but two or three; they are to be known by their subjects--

we might as well do something to justify their scorn by using the
most modern of adjectives--and call them topical. Here assuredly

there is no composure. Never before did superiority bear itself
with so little of its proper, signal, and peculiar grace--

reluctance.
If Mr. Patmore really intends that his Odes shall be read with

minim, or crochet, or quaver rests, to fill up a measure of beaten
time, we are free to hold that he rather arbitrarily applies to

liberal verse the laws of verse set for use--cradle verse and march-
marking verse (we are, of course, not considering verse set to

music, and thus compelled into the musical time). Liberal verse,
dramatic, narrative, meditative, can surely be bound by no time

measures--if for no other reason, for this: that to prescribe
pauses is also to forbid any pauses unprescribed. Granting,

however, his principle of catalexis, we still doubt whether the
irregular metre of The Unknown Eros is happily used except for the

large sweep of the flight of the Ode more properly so called.