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: