"Tired Memory," an ode of great beauty, interprets that delicate and difficult experience by which the new love was reconciled to that other—infinitely mourned, infinitely cherished, scarcely yet resigned to the "stony rock of death's insensibility." In the pathos and intimacy of its self-revelation, the poem is not unworthy of comparison with the Vita Nuova. Emily Patmore, when death seemed quite near, had begged her husband to wed again: so now in a passionate reverie he brings her his confession of the strange new joy which will not be denied.
O my most dear,
Was't treason, as I fear?
the poet muses. And with brief stroke of surpassing delicacy he traces Love's "chilly dawn," the coming of this fair stranger with her starlike, half-remembered graces, the tired heart's reluctant stirring,
And Nature's long suspended breath of flame
Persuading soft and whispering Duty's name,
Awhile to smile and speak
With this thy Sister sweet, and therefore mine;
Thy Sister sweet,
Who bade the wheels to stir
Of sensitive delight in the poor brain,
Dead of devotion and tired memory,
So that I lived again,
And, strange to aver,
With no relapse into the void inane,
For thee;
But (treason was't?) for thee and also her.
There were more than subjective difficulties in the way of a marriage, however. Miss Byles would seem to have taken a more or less formal vow of celibacy, from which, later on, she was duly dispensed; while the poet, on his side, impetu-
