Coventry Patmore by Alice Meynell

To prophesy that the odes of Coventry Patmore shall be confessed, a hundred years hence, high classic poetry, is assuredly to promise the critics of a hundred years hence high classic quality in their judgement. It is to look for a definite intelligence and for an explicit code of literary law, inasmuch as a mind trained in the less obvious measures and restraints both of thought and of verse is needed to recognize the law of _The Unknown Eros_. It is to look, not only for such precision, but for its rare companions-liberty, flight, height, courage, a sense of space and a sense of closeness, readiness for spiritual experience, and all the gravity, all the resolution, of the lonely reader of a lonely poet. Whatever criticism may learn in time to come, _The Unknown Eros_ will hardly then have many readers, and will no doubt still keep the accidental loneliness that surrounds it now by reason of the indifference of the majority; but its essential loneliness is its own quality, conferred by no world's neglect; not an effect of conspicuousness or difference; not a mere contrast, for it is relative to nothing.

The reader undertakes at least to know and to watch that solitude. It was assuredly a sense of the gravity of this enterprise that inspired the phrase, ‘lonely watcher of the skies'; a star is lonely, and its student, whatever his conditions, lonely as he watches. Pausing upon that significant phrase, we ask for a moment whose it is. Not Keats's, evidently; and it proves at last to be a word of Patmore's own; and the lonely watcher is his rapt and vigilant reader. In a now cancelled passage of Coventry Patmore's ode, _Tired Memory_, occurs the ‘lonely' astronomer. Who can complain that there are not many prepared for such a vigil? Moreover, _The Unknown Eros_, although we may attempt images of sidereal distance to express its profound flight, has the more dreadful solitude of an experience, and goes far in an inverse flight, through the essentially single human heart-intimately into time and space, remotely into the heart of hearts.