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98 part joyous story; and in the main, he avoided the pitfalls both of his form and his theme to a marvel. There is no denying a certain obvious quality to the Angel in the House. But those who find it merely "sweet" or "innocuous" must have missed the more transcendent message of the Wedding Sermon, and of those interesting Preludes which, chorus-like, precede and interpret the various cantos. "The Spirit's Epochs," the "Daughter of Eve," and many another of these lyrics are of singular beauty and power—as, for instance, this pregnant stanza of "Unthrift":

Doubtless it was this rarer quality, coupled with Patmore's eternally real tenderness, which attracted the immediate appreciation of the poets themselves. Tennyson believed it "one of the very small number of great poems which the world has had"; Father Gerard Hopkins (who knew the work in a later edition which his own criticism had helped to perfect) declared that "to dip into it was like opening a basket of violets." And Ruskin, both in season and out of season, proclaimed that the Angel ought to become "one of the most blessedly popular" poems in our language. At last, and after much early neglect, his words were fulfilled. Patmore's work became the poetic idol of England: its colouring of popular taste was reflected in Owen Meredith's Lucile, as in Woolner's My