it is R.H. Hutton who remarks that it is not "easy to give us a firm
grasp of any great class of truths without loosening our grasp on some
other class of truths perhaps nobler and more vital;" and undoubtedly
Patmore and his school in emphasizing the fallacies of neo-platonic
asceticism are in danger of precipitating us into fallacies every whit
as uncatholic. It is therefore as professedly formulating the principles
of a certain school that we are interested in the doctrine of which
Patmore constitutes himself the apostle.

Lights are constantly breaking in upon me [he
writes] and convincing me more and more that the
singular luck has fallen to me of having to write, for
the first time that any one even attempted to do so
with any fulness, on simply the greatest and most
exquisite subject that ever poet touched since the
beginning of the world.

The more I consider the subject of the marriage of
the Blessed Virgin, the more clearly I see that it is the
_one_ absolutely lovely and perfect subject for poetry.
Perfect humanity, verging upon, but never entering the
breathless region of the Divinity, is the real subject of
_all_ true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto, an
"ideal" and not a reality has been the subject, more
or less.

Taking the "Angel of the House" as representing the earlier, and the
"Odes" the later stage of the development which this theme received
under his hands, it seems as though he passes from the idealization and
apotheosis of married love to the conception of it as being in its