and it seems to me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The pauses in Patmore, left as they are to be a kind of breathing, or pause for breath, may not seem to be everywhere faultless to all ears; but they _are_ the pauses in breathing, while in Cowley the structure of his verse, when it is irregular, remains as external, as mechanical, as the couplets of the _Davideis_. Whether Patmore ever acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the true analogy of the _Odes_ is with the Italian lyric of the early Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and especially in the _Canzoniere_ of the former, that we must look for examples of the source of Patmore's later poetic form. Here again, while there may be a closer 'analogy,' at least in spirit, there is another, and even clearer difference in form. The canzoni of Petrarch are composed in stanzas of varying, but in each case uniform, length, and every stanza corresponds precisely in metrical arrangement with every other stanza in the same canzone. In English the _Epithalamion_ and the _Prothalamion_ of Spenser (except for their refrain) do exactly what Petrarch had done in Italian; and whatever further analogy there may be between the spirit of Patmore's writing and that of Spenser in these two poems, the form is essentially different. The resemblance with _Lycidas_ is closer, and closer still with the poems of Leopardi, though Patmore has not followed the Italian habit of mingling rhymed and non-rhymed verse, nor did he ever experiment, like Goethe, Heine, Matthew Arnold, and Henley, in wholly unrhymed irregular lyrical verse.