All sense, not merely of the delicacy, but of the correctness of rhythm, seems to have left him suddenly, without warning. And then, the straightening and tightening of the bonds of metre having had its due effect, an unprecedented thing occurred. In the _Odes_ of 1868, absorbed finally into _The Unknown Eros_ of 1877, the iambic metre is still used; but with what a new freedom, and at the summons of how liberating an inspiration! At the same time Patmore's substance is purged and his speech loosened, and, in throwing off that burden of prose stuff which had tied down the very wings of his imagination, he finds himself rising on a different movement. Never was a development in metre so spiritually significant. In spite of Patmore's insistence to the contrary, as in the letter which I have already quoted, there is no doubt that the difference between _The Angel in the House_ and _The Unknown Eros_ is the difference between what is sometimes poetry in spite of itself, and what is poetry alike in accident and essence. In all his work before the _Odes_ of 1868, Patmore had been writing down to his conception of what poetry ought to be; when, through I know not what suffering, or contemplation, or actual inner illumination, his whole soul had been possessed by this new conception of what poetry could be, he began to write as finely, and not only as neatly, as he was able. The poetry which came, came fully clothed, in a form of irregular but not lawless verse, which Mr. Gosse states was introduced into English by the _Pindarique Odes_ of Cowley, but which may be more justly derived, as Patmore himself, in one of his prefaces, intimates, from an older and more genuine poet, Drummond of Hawthornden. Mr. Gosse is cruel enough to say that Patmore had 'considerable affinities' with Cowley, and that 'when Patmore is languid and Cowley is unusually felicitous, it is difficult to see much difference in the form of their odes.' But Patmore, in his essay on metre, has said, If there is not sufficient motive power of passionate thought, no typographical aids will make anything of this sort of verse but metrical nonsense--which it nearly always is--even in Cowley, whose brilliant wit and ingenuity are strangely out of harmony with most of his measures;