ously and quite unreasonably left Rome upon the discovery that his fiancée was possessed of a large personal fortune. By the good agency of friends all was eventually reconciled. Patmore returned to England to prepare his little family for the new mother, and on 18 July, 1864, the couple were married by Cardinal Manning at the church of Saint Mary of the Angels, Bayswater.
Of course, neither the second marriage nor the religious change was welcome news to our poet's English friends. Yet, in the home-circle at least, Mary Patmore's victory was complete. The few letters of hers which have been preserved evince the most gentle, even scrupulous, tenderness toward Patmore's children, a fastidious interest in his literary work, and a certain sweet austerity which must have been distinctly piquante to her outspoken and imperious husband. There is something deliciously daring in her shy comments upon the Angel: "It is a shame for you to have been initiated into a thing or two quite solely feminine," she writes to Coventry; and yet again she refers to the "Wedding Sermon" as "not so high in some parts as Thomas à Kempis, than whom nobody ought to be lower, to my thinking." It sounds just a little bit formidable! Yet that uncompromising elevation of soul, and the vestal reserve of manner which few friends were able to pierce, were in reality the best possible foil for Patmore's passionately sensuous yet mystical nature. All of his most searching work—the Odes, perhaps the lost "Sponsa Del," and the complete finding of his own soul—were accomplished during his life with her.
Shortly after this marriage the poet's lungs were found to be so seriously affected that it became necessary to leave London and the Museum permanently. And so during the main part of
