known as a "reverent agnostic," and Coventry naïvely tells us that until his twelfth year he was an agnostic, too. He had, indeed, received no definite religious instruction; but coming at that time upon some little book of devotion, he was impressed with a gasp "what an exceedingly fine thing it would be if there really were a God" with whom he might live on terms of love and obedience. It was the first of those illuminations or angel-visits of which our poet was vaguely conscious all through his youth: visits which as yet left slight impression upon the outer life, but which cast upon the things of earth sudden gleams of interpretation, and in one memorable instance forced upon him a most intense and lasting apprehension of the supreme worth of personal purity.
But poetry, that elect lady and predestined passion of his life, early claimed some initiative allegiance. From Patmore's own account, it was at about the age of sixteen (in "The River," and "The Woodman's Daughter") that he first turned seriously to verse-making; writing then also a remarkable little essay on Macbeth, published later in the Pre-Raphaelite Germ. The fact that an original tragedy was also in contemplation would scarcely be worth noting save for the subjective experience which it induced. For by another wholly characteristic illumination, the boy student came to perceive that such tragedy as might inspire the highest poetry "ought to present the solution, rather than the mere conclusion, by death, of the evils and disasters of life." Here, assuredly, was no ordinary fruit of youthful speculation, but the basis of that philosophic and fundamental simplicity which Patmore was so uncommonly to attain. May it not, in truth, be recognised as a note of that Divine
