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Rh sorrow, that in 1864 he obtained leave of absence from the British Museum for a few months' travel in Italy. It was arranged that he should join Aubrey de Vere in Rome; but, on the whole, the bereaved poet seems to have anticipated the trip without enthusiasm. "I expect," he wrote to that wise little Emily Honoria, "to be very dull and miserable for the first two or three weeks, until I get to Rome; but when I am there I shall be all right, for nobody can be dull or miserable where Mr. de Vere is."

A more compelling, though as yet an unacknowledged, magnet was drawing Patmore to the Eternal City. For almost ten years—during which time he stood as a "High" Anglican—a shadowy but colossal vision of the Church Catholic had been looming before his consciousness, alternately claiming and repulsing his affections. The Catholic position, he tells us, had early been revealed to him as so logically perfect as almost to imply an absence of life: while from his reading of St. Thomas he discovered two luminous facts; first, the eminent realily of Catholic devotional literature; secondly, that "true poetry and true theological science have to do with one and the same ideal, and that . . . they differ only as the Peak of Teneriffe and the table-land of Central Asia do." Yet the unalterable repugnance of his wife Emily (who was the daughter of a Dissenting minister, and all her life "invincibly" prejudiced and terrified by some imaginary spectre of Papistry !) had long seemed a tenable argument against the momentous change. In point of fact, what the poet actually needed, each day more imperiously, was simply the gift of resolute faith. And so, pilgrim-like, with unerring instinct, he travelled back that old, old road which leads to Rome.