understanding or his conscience from the moment of his reception into the Catholic Church. Yet, with his brave, resolute candour, he has confessed that the quiet and absolute regnancy of faith before which his soul longed to bow was denied for many a weary year. More particularly was he conscious of something perfunctory in his service of the Most Blessed Virgin—of an imperfect harmony with the mind of the Church in this immemorial devotion. So he resolved upon a curious and conspicuous act, half votive, half penitential, very humble and popular and un-Patmorean—namely, a pilgrimage to Lourdes! The poet set out toward the grotto of Bernadette's vision with a beautiful crushing of personal repugnance, asking much of the good God, giving what in him lay. The result is best told in his own words:
"On the fourteenth of October, 1877, I knelt at the Shrine by the River Gave, and rose without any emotion or enthusiasm or unusual sense of devotion, but with a tranquil sense that the prayers of thirty-five years had been granted. I paid two visits of thanksgiving to Lourdes in the two succeeding Octobers, for the gift which was then received and which has never since for a single hour been withdrawn."
One more dogma was thus revealed to Coventry Patmore; not merely as a convenient "form of sound words" but as a fact with vital bearing upon the rest of life. Mary of Nazareth became to him thenceforth the essential womanhood—the symbol and prototype of humanity, nature, the body. In her littleness and sweetness was found the perfect complement to God's infinitude: she was Regina Mundi as well as Regina Cœli, foreshadowing the triumph of every faithful soul. A great epic upon the Marriage of the Virgin was to have celebrated
