sophic, mysticism—the symbolic interpretation of life—is once again becoming a potent factor. At the same time, a certain analytical brutality has accustomed latter-day readers to face reality, even to crave reality. Each of these tendencies is favourable to Patmore, creating an audience (larger, though never large!) which his poetry may in time both delight and dominate.
"I have written little, but it is all my best," he wrote in one of his Prefaces; "I have never spoken when I had nothing to say, nor spared time or labour to make my words true. I have respected posterity; and should there be a posterity which cares for letters, I dare to hope that it will respect me." He did, in fact, write little, and not one of the great works he planned was ever completed. Neither can all of this little be rightly termed his best. His style was nervous and unequal; capable of the most breathless perfection both of passion and of music, but capable also of perversity and a curious commonplaceness. Yet the most fastidious posterity shall respect him. He was, in his great moments, one of our supreme lyric artists. He sounded the heart-beats with poignant and unforgettable truthfulness. He may be said to have created a verse-form of powerful originality. And then, his was that fusing imagination (the crowning gift of genius!) which transmutes reason and emotion with equal facility into one "agile bead of boiling gold."
But it is not merely with Patmore's poetry—nor, for that matter, with his prose—that the critical world must one day reckon. It is pre-eminently with his poetic philosophy. Teaching in his verse only by suggestions of rare beauty, but throughout the essays with increasing definition and completeness, he formulated a very consistent
