Eros, Patmore leads his reader into a realm of palpitating beauty, truth and love. The sensuous nature, by no means annihilated in this new life of the spirit, is glorified and inconceivably satisfied. The capacity of the soul for good (which our poet always contended was "in proportion to the strength of its passions") is infinite, because these passions are marshalled into the orderly service of God. Here, at last, the Body receives its meet salutation, not as "our Brother the Ass," but as the
Little sequestered pleasure-house
For God and for His Spouse;
and human love becomes a ladder leading up to mystic visions of Christ as the Love, the Bride-groom of the soul. Pre-eminently in the old exquisite myth of Eros and Psyche, but scarcely less in the experience of every loving and suffering life, Patmore found this all-but-unspeakable truth prefigured, and he played upon the motif in ode after ode of marvellous beauty and tenderness.
The exceeding intimacy with which our poet clothed (or shall one say—unclothed?) his transcendent theme has proved distasteful to many a devout but colder mind; to Aubrey de Vere, who begged the suppression of the Psyche odes, to Cardinal Newman, who never became quite reconciled to thus "mixing up amorousness with religion." The same exception, obviously, might be taken to the Canticle of Canticles and to much subsequent mystical writing. For love, as Coventry Patmore understood it, was "the highest of virtues as well as the sweetest of emotions . . . being in the brain confession of good; in the heart, love for, and desire to sacrifice everything for the good of its object; in the senses, peace, purity and ardour." In this most elemental of
