Beautiful Lady; and before the author's death almost a quarter of a million copies had been sold.
In a most real sense this idyll of domestic love was the fruit of the poet's union with Emily Patmore. He himself declared that to the "subtlety and severity" of his wife's poetic taste the work owed "whatever completeness it has, not to mention many of the best thoughts, which stand verbatim as she gave them to me." Just here it may be wise to remark that Coventry Patmore was an impressionist in all statements of fact, that (in the words of his friend Edmund Gosse) "he talked habitually in a sort of guarded hyperbole"; hence his writings and recorded conversations abound in the most excessive appreciation or—its opposite! There seems, however, no doubt that Emily Patmore was responsible not merely for the inspiration of the Angel, but for much of its actual form. The seal of her firm, frail little hand is upon its beauties and its limitations; and without her revelation of human tenderness, her prodigal self-sacrifice as wife and mother, the poem had scarcely been possible. So about the brief dedication of the finished work there hung a double tragedy. It was "To the memory of her by whom and for whom I became a Poet,"—for she had died one year before its completion.
In the summer of 1862, after suffering for five years from consumption, Patmore's wife passed bravely and peacefully out of the little circle which she had made in very truth "a world of love shut in, a world of strife shut out." Slight as were the poet's means, he had spared no effort that Emily should be "as much cared for as any duchess"; and when the break at last came, his anguish was acute. The "Azalea" ode, which records an
