Page:The Poet's Chantry pg 117.jpg

Rh rationale of life, love, and God. It was a mystical superstructure reared upon the foundation of Christian dogma, an interpretation of the "corollaries of belief." In another sense it may be called the psychology of sex, since in the mysteries of manhood and womanhood Patmore found the heavens above and the earth beneath explained. God he apprehended as the great positive, masculine magnet of the universe—the soul as the feminine or receptive force; and in this conjunction of first and last lay the source of all life and joy. These sexual characteristics he detected in literature and art, as intellectual strength or sensible beauty was found to pre-dominate; while in the workings of conscience there was a similar duality, the rational and the sensitive soul. But as the poems have shown, it was the great sacrament of nuptial love which most clearly manifested the mystery.

his Psyche cries out to her immortal lover: and even so did Patmore conceive of the life-giving God. Originally, he declared, there were three sexes (which in the Holy Trinity, Truth, Love and Life, found their divine prototype), and it was mainly in order to achieve this complete, but forgotten, homo that "nuptial knowledge" became the one thing needful. Woman, he writes in that daring and suggestive essay, Dieu et Ma Dame, "is 'homo' as well as the man, though one element, the male, is suppressed and quiescent in her, as the other, the female, is in him; and thus he becomes the Priest and representative to her of the original Fatherhood, while she is made to him the Priestess and representative of that original Beauty which is 'the express image