which prayer and love and honour should be offered to Him. She showed me what that relationship involves of heavenly submission and spotless, passionate loyalty."
A second volume of poems, containing, among others, "Tamerton Church Tower," "The Yew-berry," "The Falcon," was published by Patmore in 1853. Its simplicity—bare, and at moments almost crude—was an intentional protest against the more wilful metres just then affected by Browning and even Tennyson. Its realism may perhaps be one fruit of our poet's sympathy with the pre-Raphaelites; although that "last rub which polishes the mirror" (a watchword Patmore himself is said to have furnished the Brotherhood) was the quality it most conspicuously lacked. Yet in spite of much imperfectness and some monotony, there are strange, searching gleams of metaphysical insight in these romantic pieces; and with curious premonition, the bright particular star was that charming lyric "Eros."
But the magnum opus of Patmore's early life was at hand. That New Song, "the first of themes, sung last of all," had long been trembling upon his lips: in The Angel in the House it found its full and perfect utterance. The theme—daring, precisely because it was so simple, so universal, and to the vulgar mind so common-place—was a glorification of happy nuptial love. In itself, the graceful and very simple romance scarcely justifies repetition. "Par la grace infinie, Dieu les mit au monde ensemble"; and so in the surpassing pain and joy of love, they woo and wed. There are no memorable obstacles, no heroic sacrifices; it all passes in the conventional shadow of an English deanery; and like the delicious fairy tales of old, they live happily ever afterward—and have many children! But in
