SIR: I do not doubt, from what I have observed of the general tone of the criticisms in your columns, that, in candor and courtesy, you will allow me to enter protest, bearing such worth as private opinion may, against the estimate expressed in your last number of the merits of Mr. C. Patmore's new poem.[154] It seems to me that you have read it hastily; and that you have taken such view of it as on a first reading almost every reader of good but impatient judgment would be but too apt to concur with you in adopting--one, nevertheless, which, if you examine the poem with care, you will, I think, both for your readers' sake and Mr. Patmore's, regret having expressed so decidedly. The poem is, to the best of my perception and belief, a singularly perfect piece of art; containing, as all good art does, many very curious shortcomings (to appearance), and places of rest, or of dead color, or of intended harshness, which, if they are seen or quoted without the parts of the piece to which they relate, are of course absurd enough, precisely as the discords in a fine piece of music would be if you played them without their resolutions. You have quoted separately Mr. Patmore's discords; you might by the same system of examination have made Mozart or Mendelssohn appear to be no musicians, as you have probably convinced your quick readers that Mr. Patmore is no poet. I will not beg of you so much space as would be necessary to analyze the poem, but I hope you will let me--once for all--protest against the method of criticism which assumes that entire familiarity and simplicity in certain portions of a great work destroy its dignity. Simple things ought to be simply said, and truly poetical diction is nothing more nor less than right diction; the incident being itself poetical or not, according to its relations and the feelings which it is intended to manifest--not according to its own nature merely. To take a single instance out of Homer bearing on that same simple household work which you are so shocked at Mr. Patmore's taking notice of, Homer describes the business of a family washing, when it comes into his poem, in the most accurate terms he can find. "They took the clothes in their hands; and poured on the clean water; and trod them in trenches thoroughly, trying who could do it best; and when they had washed them and got off all the dirt, they spread them out on the sea-beach, where the sea had blanched the shingle cleanest."[155] These are the terms in which the _great_ poet explains the matter. The less poet--or, rather, man of modern wit and breeding, _without_ superior poetical power--thus puts the affair into dignified language: Then emulous the royal robes they lave, And plunge the vestures in the cleansing wave, (The vestures cleansed o'erspread the shelly sand, Their snowy lustre whitens all the strand.)