could tell us of the presence of the angel in the house, as Cromwell assured the Commons of a higher presence that it has been unknown there for many years, at least for all those through which Sir Cresswell Cresswell has been holding his court; yet we should still believe she has not left the world, and that the woman-type of the best poets is an image left floating in the mind of man on earth, from the excellent that are gone to their glory, those by whom Nature, as Petrarch sings, shows below what she can do in heaven,

in ch' ella volse

Mostrar quaggiu quanto lassu potea.

Most cheering is it to find that, notwithstanding our disclosures of unblest wedlock among so many of the paired but unmatched couples of our time, a man-a poet of fine sensibilities--who was himself husband, and we believe is a fathercould yearn as Mr. Patmore yearns

to raise

That hymn for which the whole world longs,
A worthy hymn in woman's praise;
and to understand, as we do on
good grounds, that a God-given
mate, a living woman-now for a
time lost to him, as we are sorry to
learn-should be almost the muse
of his songs of wedded love. He
sings in a noble strain of faith-

I've blush'd for love's abode, the heart;
But have not disbeliev'd in love;
Nor unto love, sole mortal thing

Of worth immortal, done the wrong
To count it, with the rest that sing,
Unworthy of a serious song.

Of the moral courage which should be proud rather than ashamed of true love, though it might be overcast on other minds with the shame of what is silly, if not impure, he says with graceful truth

'Tis right That all should know what they obey, Lest erring conscience damp delight, And folly laugh our joy away.

Mr. Patmore's poetry, as it is a teacher of refinement in that which too readily becomes coarse, is therefore a poetry of wisdom. It cannot, we think, be too often repeated in song or prose, that it is highly worth

our care to give women a fair chance of becoming true women. We should treat woman with the finest respect, not only for that she is pure, but for that she might become more rather than less so. This great truth is well put by a happy verse of our poet

And, as geranium, pink, or rose,

Is thrice itself through power of art, So may my happy skill disclose

New fairness even in her fair heart.

The objective mind of woman is a mirror to show man his uncomeliness, for his refinement; and how foolish is that man who, by wilfully or carelessly rough handling, would deface it into uselessness!

On man's reason, and woman's quicker thought, we haveOr say she wants the patient brain

To track shy truth; her facile wit, At that which he hunts down with pain, Flies straight, and does exactly hit. Of the soul-preserving power of a pure early love, the poet gives this well-worded truth

Who is the happy husband? He

Who, scanning his unwedded life, Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 'Twas faithful to his future wife. Of love's blessed return, he sings—

He does not rightly love himself

Who does not love another more.

The majesty of pure-minded beauty as a refiner of man, is well shown by Mr. Patmore, as it ought to be shown, even to woman herself, as a call to the fulfilling of her mission

To heroism and holiness

How hard it is for man to soar; But how much harder to be less Than what his mistress loves him for! There is no man so full of pride, And none so intimate with shame, And none to manhood so denied, As not to mind if women blame. Ah, wasteful woman, she who may

On her sweet self set her own price, Knowing he cannot choose but pay;

How has she cheapen'd paradise!

How given for nought her priceless gift; How spoil'd the bread and spilled the

wine,

Which, spent with due, respective thrift,

Had made brutes men, and men divine!

Mr. Patmore is a true artist, who sees beauty in all good works of man-new as well as old; in machinery as well as in the cloudcapp'd tower.' It is said, 'Wherever there is a painter there is a picture,' and so Mr. Patmore does not shrink from a landscape with a steamengine even in the foreground—

The bell rang, and with shrieks like death, Link catching link, the long array, With ponderous pulse, and fiery breath, Proud of its burden, swept away.

Mr. Patmore, unlike Horace, with the word equotutium, does not find any thing quod versu dicere non est, that cannot be moulded into his melody, so that he blends into his fair mosaic any stone that comes to his hands.

Of a girl singing at church, he sings as sweetly himself—

Her soft voice, singularly heard
Beside me, in the psalms, withstood
The roar of voices, like a bird

Sole warbling in a windy wood.

Though we call Mr. Patmore our English Petrarch, it is not that his verse sounds at all of the Italian strain, nor do we know that he has ever written a legitimate sonnet. His verse is of a quite original cast, though at times we fancy we hear, in his quaint English and gentle speech, a tone of George Herbert's lyre. The turns of his verse, like modulations of a master in music, leads us suddenly to a pleasing surprise, in a prettier ending than the one we seemed to be reaching; as Mr. Willmott says of George Herbert, that the poetical surprises of Herbert are sometimes very unexpected, and, it must be confessed, not less ingenious.

Fear that a girl might be spoilt by a London season—

She, mixing with the people there,

Might come back alter'd, having caught The foolish, fashionable air

Of knowing all, and feeling nought. This following touching bit of truth wants no explanation

Oh, how he lov'd her! She is wed!
His fondness comes about his heart
As milk comes when the babe is dead.
The following is a fine artistic

treatment of the won girl after her confession of love

Her soul, which late I loved to invest With pity for my poor desert, Buried its face within my breast, Like a pet fawn by hunters hurt. The accepted asks himself of his first feeling at waking next morning

What fortune did my heart foretell?
What shook my spirit as I woke,
Like the vibrations of a bell

Of which I had not heard the stroke.

The good tone of Mr. Patmore's poetry in the Angel in the House, is shown in one way by its contrast to that which most men would now hold to be bad,-the loose verses of 'the persons of quality' and other writers, who represent the English school of poetry of, and long after, the time of Charles the Second, such as the Earl of Rochester, Sedley, Etherege, and the writers of many of the songs in the Orpheus, as printed in the middle of the eighteenth century.

That school of poetry holds woman to be, as a girl, little above a gay pleasure, and, as a wife, a burthen, an annoyance; as cunning and bad by nature, and good only by happy chances. Whereas we hold that the true view of woman is that of Mr. Patmore, that it is rather that the bad woman is a lower than low deformity of woman in unfallen Eve, than that the good one is an improvement of a lower woman of nature.

The strong course of vice of which these writings are tokens, was met, first in England, and afterwards abroad, by societies for the reformation of manners, and by Queen Anne's earnest proclamations against vice, profaneness, and immorality.

An old song thus talks of woman and wedlock

As sparks fly upwards man is born
To sorrow and to trouble;

But he that takes to him a wife

Doth make his burden double.
For woman, we have always found,
In strife and mischief to abound.

A later writer says—
Since a whole day of happiness no man
Spent with a wife e'er since the world began.

Compare with this scoffing at wedlock Mr. Patmore's words of a young husband

As if I chafed the sparks from glass,

And said, 'It lightens ;' hitherto
The songs I've made of love may pass
For all but for proportion true:

But likeness and proportion both
Hence fail, as if a child in glee,
Catching the flakes of the salt froth,
Cried, Look, my mother, here's the sea.'

Again Sir Charles Sedley writes of honour in courtship—

Come, then, my Celia, let's no more
This devil for a god adore.
If we the laws of love had kept,
And not in dreams of honour slept,
He would have surely, long ere this,
Have crown'd us with the highest bliss.
Our joy had then been as complete
As now our folly has been great.

We think this even more than doubtful, and rather take Patmore's view of the social evil

The wrong is made, and measured by
The rights' inverted dignity,
Change love to shame, as love is high,
So low in hell your bed shall be.

An old song of Orpheus tells us, as a piece of good instruction

As Damon, who had hardly sped

In wedlock's heavy chains,
His tender flocks with Thyrsis fed
Upon the smiling plains;

Thus to the youth the sage exclaim'd,
And the curst hour in which he married,
damn'd.

Would'st thou, my friend, in pleasure live,

Nor thy repose destroy?

Would'st thou the bliss that youth can give, Without remorse enjoy?

Oh! shun that fatal rock, a wife, That galls thy days with endless plague and strife.

We think the sage is here hardly worthy of his name, and take, as more worthy of Damon's thought, Mr. Patmore's apostrophe to a betrayed daughter of EveSweet patience sanctify thy woes!

And doubt not but our God is just, Albeit unscath'd thy traitor goes,

And thou art stricken to the dust. That penalty's the best to bear

Which follows soonest on the sin; And guilt's a game where losers fare

Better than those who seem to win.

'A good wife (says Saadi, the old Persian poet), buxom and godly, will make the poorest man the equal of a king. If thou hast the happiness to take to thy bosom a friend, in a union that nothing will loosen, thou mayst beat the cymbals (of joy) before thy door seven times a day.'

These contrasts will help to show that Mr. Patmore's writings are good wisdom as well as good poetry; and we think his Angel in the House would be a good wedding gift to a bridegroom from his friends; though, wherever it is read with a right view of its high aim, we believe it will be found itself, more or less, of an angel in the house, offering to woman herself a high pattern of gentle purity, and helping man to a knowledge and feeling of the excellent in the true woman's mind, which calls for such a knowledge and feeling, as a seedling that, under the skill and care of a good gardener, ripens in the most beautiful bloom, though, under rude ignorance, it might be utterly spoilt. 'Keep,' says our poet,

Keep your undrest, familiar style

For strangers, but respect your friend;
Her most whose matrimonial smile
Is, and asks honour without end.

One songster writes of Orpheus seeking from the dominions of Pluto his lost wife Eurydice—

Pluto, enraged that any he
Should enter his dominions free,
And to inflict the sharpest pain,
Made him a husband once again.

Against this joke, for we take it only as a joke, we will set the death of a wife, as the subject of a dream, from Mr. Patmore's pen; a pen that, like our own, can tell the world it is not a joke for a once happy husband and father of children to be left as the Welsh bard, Richard puts it— Fel c'lomen un adain, anwydog. Sorrowing like a dove with one wing.

The duties of my life the same,

Their meaning for the feelings gone; Friendship impertinent, and fame

Disgusting; and, more harrowing, none; Small household troubles fall'n to me;

As, What time would I dine to-day?' And, oh! how could I bear to see

Her noisy children at their play?

Besides, where all things limp and halt, Could I go straight? should I alone Have kept my love without default, Pitch'd at the true and heavenly tone?. The festal day might come to mind,

That miss'd the gift which more endears; The hour which might have been more kind, And now less fertile in vain tears. The good of common intercourse, For daintier graces then despised, Now with what passionate remorse, What poignancy of hunger prized! The little wrong, now greatly rued,

Which no repentance now could right.

So Petrarch, in the version of Lady Dacre

Nor aught of lovely, aught of gay in show, Shall touch my heart, now cold within her tomb,

Who was, erewhile, my life and light below;

So heavy, tedious, sad-my days unblest, That I, with strong desire, invoke death's gloom,

Her to behold, whom ne'er to have seen were best.

With which, if we had room, we might compare the ode of the bard, Llywelyn Goch, on the death of the lovely Llencu Llwyd

Nid oes yn Ngwynedd, &c.
In Gwenedd now no more I view
Or moon, or light, or shining hue, &c.

It is told by a commentator of

the Chinese book, The Book of Rewards, that a statesman, having lost his beloved wife, showed so much sorrow that the emperor tried to console him, but that he soon consoled himself with another mate; whereupon the emperor cried, 'Since that man is so unfaithful to his wife, how will he serve me with faithfulness?' and dismissed him from his office.

We think Mr. Patmore hardly does justice to his muse, whose light footsteps trace such graceful figures in the Angel in the House, when he confines her to the undanced couplets of the Cywydd, as the Welsh bards would call the verse of his Faithful for Ever.

The following is a fine bit of strong action in a storm

now

A blast made all the woodland bow;
Against the whirl of leaves and dust
Kine dropp'd their heads; the tortur'd gust
Jagg'd and convulsed the ascending smoke
To mockery of the lightning's stroke.
The blood prick'd, and a blinding flash
And close, co-instantaneous crash,
Humbled the soul, and rain all round,
Resilient, dimm'd the whistling ground,
Nor flagg'd in force from first to last,
Till, sudden as it came, 'twas past;
Leaving a trouble in the copse
Of brawling birds, and tinkling drops.

In the strain, then, for which Mr. Patmore has tuned his lute, he is in company with great masters of song, though his music is quite his own; and we thank him for the profit as well as the pleasure afforded by the winning poesy of his pure-souled muse.