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    ship , when the latter are simply contemplated as the be-all and the end-all of the poet ' s songs of love . The total poem , therefore , is a love lyric , commencing at the very beginning of the passion , and ending when ten years of married existence have passed , and when husband and wife are also father and mother . The conception is not entirely new to literature ; but it is a noble one , which had been singularly neglected , and which certainly waited development in the form of a poem worthy of the theme . A finer theme or one appealing more largely to the universal human soul , it would he impossible to find ; and Mr . Patmore has brought to its elucidation the brain and heart of a true poet , profound reverence for his subject , and , manifestly , a large amount of patient labour in thought , phraseology , and construction . On some points , however , we have a few objections to offer , which it may

    be as well to explain at once . Our readers are aware of the consistency with which we have opposed the spasmodic style , and will understand the earnestness of our wish to see the poetry of this nineteenth century wisely rescued from the influence of such parching and withering gusts . We must , therefore , needs feel some disappointment at finding a writer , with the desire and the genius to aid in that reform , rather compromising than advancing it by the common error of casting himself into the opposite extreme . Because gaudiness is bad , we are not to adopt Quakerism ; yet something like drab and slate-colour forms the complexion of Mr . Patniore ' s poem . Because it is the fashion to introduce

    too many descriptions of natural scenery into our current poetry , and because those descriptions are often inappropriate and overwrought , that is fl . 0 reason , why Mr . Patmore should almost exclude them from his pages , especially when it is evident from the one or two he las given that he can pencil them , "witta a singularly delicate and airy touch . Because some of our living poets overstrain , themselves by pompous phraseology and ideas too vague and far-stretched for any reasonable expression , we are not the better disposed to receive the common-places of every-day conversation , the most f&miliar > topics of ordinary intercourse , ingeniously -wrought up into verse and rhyme , very easy , very natural , very clever after a certain manner , but more fitted for a novel of fashionable life than fora poem . As , for instance , this : - --. ¦ - . ¦ ¦ . , ¦ ¦ . . ' .-¦ ' ¦ '¦ ¦ ' ' . ' ¦ ¦ - ¦¦ ¦ ' - . ¦ ; : . ' ¦ ' : ' ¦ ' ¦ ¦ " ¦ : ¦ ' ¦ ' ¦ Good Mrs . Fife , To my " The Dean , is he at home ?" Said , "No , sir ; but Miss Honor is ;" And straight , not asking if I'd « ome , Announced me , " Mr . Felix , Miss , " To Mildred , in the study . There ¦ We talk'd , she working . We agreed The day was . fine ; the fancy-fair Successful ; " Did I ever read DeGenlis ? " " No . " "I must . Shehadheard I was engaged . " " To whom ? " " Miss Fry . Was it the fact ? " "No ! " "Onmyword ?" " What scandal people talk'd !"" Would I Hold out this skein of silk . " So pass'd I know not how much time away . " Hotw were her sisters ?"" Well . " At last I summon'd heart enough to say , . " I hoped to have seen Miss Churchill too . " " Miss—who ? " laugh'd Mildred ; " what is this ? I said , and so indeed it ' s true , Last night you quarrell'd ? Here she is !"

    to make twenty volumes of ordinary calibre ; indeed , the subtletv i , « T kind and a degree quite unknown to these days , though at one timeIZtL * conmion . Observe the following comparison : — n otua-. ¦ . ' ' ¦ . Immeasurable bliss Gains nothing by becoming more ! Millions liave meaning ; ufter this , Cyphers Jbrget tke integer . This is almost equal in subtlety , if not in beauty , to Donne ' s imi drawzi from a pair of compasses , in the lines : — « udge If we be two , we are two so As stiff twin compasses arc two : Thy soul , the fix'd foot , makes no show To more , but doth if th . ' other do ; And , though it in the centre sit , Yet , w ; hen the other far doth roam , It leans and hearkens aft « r it ,

    And grows erect as that comes home . And this ( to return to Mr . Patmore ) has something of the manner nf Cowley : — . 0 I Till Eve was brought to Adam , he A solitary desert trod , Though , in the great society Of Nature , Angels , and of God . The following , spoken of the woman ' s consent ^ is very beautiful and original : — That fatal " I am thine " Gomes with alternate gush and check And joltings of the heart * as wine

    Pour * d from a flask of narrow neck . Occasionally we find a simile of great delicacy and brightness in itself taken apart from the thing symbolized ; as this : — ' Pure as the permeating fires That smoulder in the opal ' s veins . Or this : — ¦ . . . . ' ' . ¦ : ¦ . . ' T . ... . . : : ¦ ¦ ' ¦ '¦ ¦ ¦;¦ ¦ ''¦¦ ' ' , '¦ But dread , she trusts , will turn to joy , Like sombre smoke to sudden Jlanw . The following is noble , both in conception and expression . The husband is vindicating married love as compared "with the first passion of youth . — " Dear wife , " said he , " a fresh-lit fire Sends forth to heaven great shows of fume , And watchers far a \ va 3 r admire : !'

    But , when the flames their power assume , The more they bura the less they sliow ; The clouds no longer smirch the sky ; And then the flames intensest glow When far-off watchers think they die . " Extracts , however , can give only a very incomplete notion of a poem which , as we have remarked , does not seek to startle by individual passages ; for , as the author himself says : — Likeness and proportion both 1 Hence fail , as if a child in glee , Catching the flakes of the salt froth , Cried , •* Look , my mother , here ' s the sea . "

    We must , therefore , be content to refer all poetical readers ( but no others , and not even the indolent and frivolous among those ) to the complete poem , confident that , at times tbey diiFer from the author , they-will more often be impressed -with the beauty of his subject , the subtlety of his intellect , and the sincerity of his devotion to his art .

    NTo doubt Mr . Patmore would say that he has a meaning in all this , and that , if * we don't find it out , the fault is in ourselves ; but the same thing , we take it , is said of his own production by every author , and it hardly settles the abstract question . At any rate , a writer does not do himself justice by adopting anything which baa even the semblance of unnecessary singularity . Another fault we conceive to be a morbid excess of intellectual analysis . If other living poets err by appealing too much to th& senses , Mr . Patmore we think , errs by a too incessant action of the brain . Judging from a large proportion of his style , we should say he has studied , much in the school of JDonne , Cowley , Crashaw , Quarles , Herbert , and other poets of the first half of the seventeenth century ; and he has often emulated them in the singular subtlety of his ' co ' nceits' and the wonderful ingenuity of his paradoxes . There is no doubt that modern poetry would be the richer and the stronger for an infusion of this element ; but Mr . Patmore persecutes us with riddles . He lays his mind , so to speak , on a metaphysical dissectingtable , and anatomizes it with painful minuteness . The result is a lecture on disease , when , -we want the healthy perceptions of vitality ; the introduction

    of a mass of doctrine , to which the reader may or may not assent , and which , therefore , fers a ground for disputation , instead of the universal sympathies of poetry . There is a perpetual intrusion of individual opinion . * ' I think thus ; all wise and good men think the same : if you think differently , it is because you are neither wise nor good ; " some such conception as this is constantly apparent . The large regard , of Nature is thus narrowed into something sectional ; while a iaint mist of Evangelical phraseology substitutes a suggestion of particulsir creeds for the poet's divine Catholicity . We do not mean to accuse Mr . Patmore of the fiercer or more repulsive forms of bigotry ; his volume , indeed , contains many beautiful instances of sweetness , charity , and human love ; neither do we object to any association of earth and heaven which the poet draws out of the natural longings of the human soul , and which he implies in the form of feeling or -emotion ; but we do doubt the advisability of allying poetry with sharply defined doctrine .

    Yet , a er all , here is a fine—in many respects a noble—poem . It is not cut , of any want of respect , cither for the author ' s « enius or for the nature of his theme , that we urge these objections ; and , if every one of them be granted , there will still bu left a large demand upon our admiration and sympathy . A . poem-which makes life nobler by fi xing what idle conceit regards as volatile and evanescent—which vindicates the essential holiness or our human affection s , and beholds only one step from the earthly to the divine—must possess the highest elements of moral beauty ; and it is impossible to read Mr . Patmore ' a volume without acknowledging that the author a intellect ia of a raro order . There k subtlety enough in these pages

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    A STORY OF MARRIED LOVE AND ITS TROUBLES . Deverell : a Novel . 3 Vola . Chapman and Hall . Devcrell is by the hand of a woman who has known suffering , and has been acquainted Avith the chamber of sickness . These facts are apparent on the fa ce o the book ; they contribute to stamp its particular character , and even account for the defects in the execution of the work . There are oversights , such as slight inconsistencies , or errors in the use of names , which might have been corrected if the work had been revised by the authoress herself . It is a novel in the form of an autobiography , in which the , writer , with a conscientious truthfulness , tells nothing that did not actually come

    within her own knowledge . But , although it is a story of the feelings , rather than of events , the uarration is graceful and really interesting The autobiographer is well endowed by nature , but is oppressed by a timidity of character which restrains her from asserting her true position , and leads her into errors . The consequences of those errors form part of the drama of the book . Aline begins with her school friendships , the most conspicuous of which interweaves her life with that of St . George Deverell , the heroine , a girl of great beauty , vehement feelings , intense love of power , and inordinate ambition . Brought up by a mother who constitutes herse a chronic sacrifice to her child , Dcverell soon learns to have her own way , soon is

    sees how to make others stepping-stones to her purpose . The character drawn with much power , and the manner in which the young girl gradually develops her schemes , —which have their small beginning in the indu jgeiico of a school-girl love , and end with the enslavement of a nobleman high in the state , —is at once natural and striking . Aline has likewise yielded to the indulgence of a school love ; rather , however , from softness of character than vehemence of feelings ; she lias contracted an early and imprudent marriage ; she conceals it from her friends , from the husband whom she marries after she becomes a widow ; the concealment begets susp icion , ana suspicion estrangement . The scheming : Deverell , who haa a distinct , purpose constantly in view , is able to set tho foibles of one person against another , until all , even those who are far superior to herself , become p laythings in her hands , and instruments for coercing and tormenting euuh other . J- strength comes out more towards the cud ; the earlier portion might , perliap » i have been more compressed with advantage to the ultimate effect . W c j > u * posely abstain , however , from spoiling tho interest of the atory by any oxp nation of the plot . , t Mornl courage ia , perhaps , tho quality which of all others is tho m commonly wanting , and it ia in tho want of this courage that reser

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    1098 THE LBiDBB . : [ JSTo . 347 , Satvbdav

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), Nov. 15, 1856, page 1098, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2167/page/18/