One of the most remarkable poetic affinities of recent times is to be found between the genius of Francis Thompson and that of Alice Meynell. However much these two poets may have resembled each other in spiritual temperament no two could differ more decidedly in poetic method. Thompson, whose manner is piled up in magnificence, exuberant in trailing and intricate imagery, drenched with every perfume and stained with every dye that he can extract from language at the very pitch of eloquence, is in his diction the flushed and almost breathless consummation of all the more luxuriant tendencies in Victorian verse. Alice Meynell, on the other hand, with her diction so chaste and disciplined and exact, her imagery so frugal and unadorned, is a rarefied incarnation of the grave magic that the genius of Matthew Arnold had caught from the seventeenth century, a century which in so far as it worked upon Thompson did so rather in its florid ecstasy. And yet the poet from whom both Thompson and Alice Meynell derived more clearly than any other among the Victorians was Patmore, and it was no doubt a consciousness that they inherited widely divergent strains from a common parentage that accounted in some measure, at least, for their responsiveness to each other, not merely in sympathetic appreciation, but in their essential poetic natures. For Patmore, too, knew the seventeenth century, and more consciously than did any other poet of his time, and he knew it both in its serene logical enchantment and in its almost demoniac spiritual fervour. He wore both manners with a Victorian difference, but he could wear them and independently of each other. Of the first this is an example--_Vesica Piscis_. In strenuous hope I wrought, And hope seem’d still betray’d; Lastly I said, “I have labour’d through the Night, nor yet Have taken aught; But at Thy word I will again cast forth the net!” And, lo, I caught (Oh, quite unlike and quite beyond my thought,) Not the quick, shining harvest of the Sea, For food, my wish, But Thee! Then, hiding even in me, As hid was Simon’s coin within the fish, Thou sigh’st, with joy, “Be dumb, Or speak but of forgotten things to far-off times to come.” And of the second, this-- * * * * *