In his earlier work, it is with human love only that he deals; in his later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so incalculable a height of mystic rapture, possessed the whole man, throughout the whole of his life, shutting him into a 'solitude for two' which has never perhaps been apprehended with so complete a satisfaction. He was a married monk, whose monastery was the world; he came and went in the world, imagining he saw it more clearly than any one else; and, indeed, he saw things about him clearly enough, when they were remote enough from his household prejudices. But all he really ever did was to cultivate a little corner of a garden, where he brought to perfection a rare kind of flower, which some thought too pretty to be fine, and some too colourless to be beautiful, but in which he saw the seven celestial colours, faultlessly mingled, and which he took to be the image of the flower most loved by the Virgin in heaven. Patmore was a poet profoundly learned in the technique of his art, and the _Prefatory Study on English Metrical Law_, which fills the first eighty-five pages of the _Amelia_ volume of 1878, is among the subtlest and most valuable of such studies which we have in English. In this essay he praises the simplest metres for various just reasons, but yet is careful to define the 'rhyme royal,' or stanza of seven ten-syllable lines, as the most heroic of measures; and to admit that blank verse, which he never used, 'is, of all recognised English metres, the most difficult to write well in.' But, in his expressed aversion for trochaic and dactylic measures, is he not merely recording his own inability to handle them? and, in setting more and more rigorous limits to himself in his own dealing with iambic measures, is he not accepting, and making the best of, a lack of metrical flexibility? It is nothing less than extraordinary to note that, until the publication of the nine _Odes_ in 1868, not merely was he wholly tied to the iambic measure, but even within those limits he was rarely quite so good in the four-line stanza of eights and sixes as in the four-line stanza of eights; that he was usually less good in the six-line than in the four-line stanza of eights and sixes; and that he was invariably least good in the stanza of three long lines which, to most practical intents and purposes, corresponds with this six-line stanza. The extremely slight licence which this rearrangement into longer lines affords was sufficient to disturb the balance of his cadences, and nowhere else was he capable of writing quite such lines as: One friend was left, a falcon, famed for beauty, skill and size, Kept from his fortune's ruin, for the sake of its great eyes.