During all this time the poet's heart was growing intermittently weaker, and his lungs, long undermined, caused increasing anxiety. At Lymington, whither he had removed, there were repeated attacks and convalescences; and at last, in the November of 1906, a congestion set in. "What about going to Heaven this time?" Patmore asked his physician, with weary but irrepressible humour. The next day, after receiving the last Sacraments, his agony began. His words were broken prayers and thoughts for those about him. "I love you, dear," he whispered to his wife when the end was very near, "but the Lord is my Life and my Light." Into this larger life he passed painlessly on 26 November, 1906; and in the humble habit of St. Francis' tertiary, his body was borne to its long rest in the little sea-coast cemetery.
Coventry Patmore's career as poet had closed full twenty years earlier, with the "collected" edition of 1886: consequently his place in our literature has long passed the first tentative stage. The waxings and wanings of contemporary taste—the flood-tide of the Angel, the ebb-tide of the earlier odes, the ominous calm of the final years—no longer any whit affect his reputation. It has attained a solid and certain degree of permanence. He has, quite indisputably, survived: as a name indeed to the "general reader," but as a fact in the great confraternity of song. Francis Thompson was eager in acknowledging his debt to "this strong, sad soul of sovereign song"; while others not so eager have gathered the riches of his vineyard. It is even possible to say that the chances of any just appreciation of his work are greater to-day than they were yesterday, and that probably they will be greater to-morrow than they are to-day. For in the literary world, as in the philo-
