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94 made the acquaintance of Tennyson—then also the occupant of a modest apartment "up two or three flights of stairs." Together they discussed letters, together they dined, together they walked half the nights away; and although the elder poet had not yet attained universal recognition, he was to the devoted Coventry a font of perfectness. Years later, when a breach had severed the intimacy, Patmore's proud and essentially original spirit used to refer bitterly to the days when he had followed Tennyson about "like a dog."

But infinitely more potent than any other influence upon our poet's youth was that of a woman, Emily Augusta Andrews, destined to create for him one of the ideal unions of literary history. She became the wife of Coventry Patmore, after a brief courtship, in 1847 (her twenty-fourth and his twenty-fifth year), and, to the end, the exquisite intimacy and dignity of their love served as a veritable initiation into the mysteries of life. The mingled simplicity and stateliness of Emily Patmore, her strange beauty—perpetuated by Woolner, Millais, and Browning —her selfless devotion, her wit and, withal, her practical wisdom, come down to us upon the testimony of nearly all who were privileged to know her. And the gentle sway which she exercised over the heart and mind of her husband was absolute until her death. "I have been thinking to-day," Coventry wrote in 1860, when the great shadow was already falling across his hearthstone, "of all your patient, persistent goodness, your absolutely flawless life, and all your amiable, innocent graces." In another place he declares that her love revealed to him what was to prove the basic philosophy of his life and work: "The relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife is the key to the feeling with