So sit till morning! when the light is grown That he the path can read, Then bid the man God-speed! His morning is not thine: yet must thou own They have a cheerful warmth--those ashes on the stone. The single exception that has been mentioned to the generalization, that Browning had little effect upon the work of his greater contemporaries, is Coventry Patmore. Of all the great poets of his time he has hitherto been by far the least generally understood and appreciated. His most celebrated poem, _The Angel in the House_, is full of material that lends itself easily to light censure, and, however tenderly the poem may be lit by intermittent beauties, it must be allowed that the general scheme is, on the whole, at least a poetic indiscretion, which in the case of so ambitious a structure is to write down failure. But the Patmore of the _Odes_ is another matter, and here we have a poet who can find his company only among the greatest of his time. And the manner of these _Odes_ is one of great range and variety, not at all the range and variety of a facile imitative gift, but notably of original poetic invention. It may, in view of his relative reputation, and, indeed, of his relative stature, sound a preposterous thing to say, and I admit that I say it only to stress an argument, but if the work of a single poet alone had to be chosen to survive in witness of the genius of Victorian poetry in its many aspects, a by no means frivolous case might be made for Patmore’s claim. It is true that many aspects of the age’s genius would then be recorded in something a little short of their finest manifestation, though others could hardly ask for more authoritative witness. But in no one poet are the several aspects assembled at so representative a level of expression. The pressure of Patmore’s individual poetic energy was not so great as that of Tennyson or Browning, hardly as that of Morris or Arnold or Swinburne. His spiritual insight at its most intense was as revealing as that of any poet of his or, indeed, of any age, but in his poetic life he did not dwell as habitually at the centre of creative energy as those his great contemporaries. There was too often something occasional in his work, not in the mere choice of subject, but in his imaginative relation to the subject when chosen, to allow him poetic constancy of the first order. And that is, perhaps, on the whole, the reason why, advancing as his reputation continues to be in the best critical opinion, it is, and is likely to remain, a little below that of the highest of his time. While this is so, however, it is also true that there was very little in the manifold achievement of Victorian poetry that Patmore did not at some time or another come to by the entirely personal movement of his own genius. This copiousness in his talent was a thing quite distinct from Swinburne’s sublime virtuosity, more lonely in its origin and much more far-reaching in its influence.