TWO FAITHS

OH PRAY for me!-thou know'st what prayer I need!
What is it to be one in whose weak heart

Two faiths are lodged, while thought and feeling bleed

In the wild war; yet neither will depart?
What is it to be one, spell-drawn to stay
For the completing of his nature, trembling
Between two different characters each day,
And seem to his harsh friends to be dissembling?
Watch me, as thou hast watched Mosella's waves
Bringing her clear, sweet waters down from Treves,
To Neuendorf along yon southern shore
Breasting with hope the turbulent green Rhine,
Till the old flood claims both his banks once more
Pray on-pray on: like fate may yet be mine.

5

10

COVENTRY PATMORE'

1823-1896

Coventry Patmore, convert, essayist, and poet, was born in Essex in 1823. He was educated privately but remained untrained, so that, financial reverses overtaking his family, he was forced to take whatever employment offered itself.

Fortunately, however, he obtained a position in the library of the British Museum which, furnishing him with a sufficient income, allowed him, in addition, to follow his natural bent. For, having written at an early age verses which were brought out by his father and had pleased such a critic as Leigh Hunt, he now continued to write, publishing his first important work, Tamerton Church Tower, in 1853. The next year saw the appearance of his Angel in the House, a long poem in which he treats of love in a manner at once exalted and yet commonplace. Patmore sprang at once into place among the major poets of the century.

In 1862 Patmore became a Catholic. The treatment of love in The Angel in the House falls not far short of the Catholic ideal and in fact many of the ideas held by Patmore up to this time tended toward Catholicity; but because of his first wife's belief he made no effort to crystallize his tendency. Upon her death, however, he journeyed to Rome for the purpose of religious study and contemplation. Naturally, because of his inclination and because of the influences with which he came in contact, his submission was inevitable.

After this date his work took on a note of deeper spirituality, partly to be accounted for by his new faith and partly by the character of his second wife, a woman of vivid personality, highly spiritual and wholly at one with him in ideal, significance which mounts at times, as in The Unknown Eros, to supreme poetic heights.

This last volume, published in 1877, is a series of odes which sums up the ideas of his later thinking regarding human and divine love. It is among the principal contributions to nineteenth century poetry. In addition to his verse, Patmore published three volumes of essays. These prose writings collected under the titles Religio Poetae; Root, Rod, and Flower; and Principle in Art are all the product of his later years. They deal, for the most part, with the same themes that he sets forth in his poetry; but, stripped as they are of poetic devices, they stand as brilliant expositions of mystical philosophy, succinct and perhaps bare,-hence, for the general reader they are too cryptic ever to be widely popular.

1Selections from the work of Coventry Patmore are reprinted by arrangement with G. Bell & Sons, Ltd., owners of the copyright.