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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=359158" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Angel In The House. Book I. Canto V.</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Preludes.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I The Comparison <br>Where she succeeds with cloudless brow,<br>In common and in holy course,<br>He fails, in spite of prayer and vow<br>And agonies of faith and force;<br>Or, if his suit with Heaven prevails<br>To righteous life, his virtuous deeds<br>Lack beauty, virtue's badge; she fails<br>More graciously than he succeeds.<br>Her spirit, compact of gentleness,<br>If Heaven postpones or grants her pray'r,<br>Conceives no pride in its success,<br>And in its failure no despair;<br>But his, enamour'd of its hurt,<br>Baffled, blasphemes, or, not denied,<br>Crows from the dunghill of desert,<br>And wags its ugly wings for pride.<br>He's never young nor ripe; she grows<br>More infantine, auroral, mild,<br>And still the more she lives and knows<br>The lovelier she's express'd a child. <br>Say that she wants the will of man<br>To conquer fame, not check'd by cross,<br>Nor moved when others bless or ban;<br>She wants but what to have were loss.<br>Or say she wants the patient brain<br>To track shy truth; her facile wit<br>At that which he hunts down with pain<br>Flies straight, and does exactly hit.<br>Were she but half of what she is,<br>He twice himself, mere love alone,<br>Her special crown, as truth is his,<br>Gives title to the worthier throne;<br>For love is substance, truth the form;<br>Truth without love were less than nought;<br>But blindest love is sweet and warm,<br>And full of truth not shaped by thought;<br>And therefore in herself she stands<br>Adorn'd with undeficient grace,<br>Her happy virtues taking hands,<br>Each smiling in another's face.<br>So, dancing round the Tree of Life,<br>They make an Eden in her breast,<br>While his, disjointed and at strife,<br>Proud-thoughted, do not bring him rest.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">II Love in Tears <br>If fate Love's dear ambition mar,<br>And load his breast with hopeless pain,<br>And seem to blot out sun and star,<br>Love, won or lost, is countless gain;<br>His sorrow boasts a secret bliss<br>Which sorrow of itself beguiles,<br>And Love in tears too noble is<br>For pity, save of Love in smiles. <br>But, looking backward through his tears,<br>With vision of maturer scope,<br>How often one dead joy appears<br>The platform of some better hope!<br>And, let us own, the sharpest smart<br>Which human patience may endure<br>Pays light for that which leaves the heart<br>More generous, dignified, and pure.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">III Prospective Faith <br>They safely walk in darkest ways<br>Whose youth is lighted from above,<br>Where, through the senses' silvery haze,<br>Dawns the veil'd moon of nuptial love.<br>Who is the happy husband? He<br>Who, scanning his unwedded life,<br>Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free,<br>'Twas faithful to his future wife.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">IV Venus Victrix <br>Fatal in force, yet gentle in will,<br>Defeats, from her, are tender pacts,<br>For, like the kindly lodestone, still<br>She's drawn herself by what she attracts.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>The Violets. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">I<br>I went not to the Dean's unbid:<br>I would not have my mystery,<br>From her so delicately hid,<br>The guess of gossips at their tea.<br>A long, long week, and not once there,<br>Had made my spirit sick and faint,<br>And lack-love, foul as love is fair,<br>Perverted all things to complaint.<br>How vain the world had grown to be!<br>How mean all people and their ways,<br>How ignorant their sympathy,<br>And how impertinent their praise;<br>What they for virtuousness esteem'd,<br>How far removed from heavenly right;<br>What pettiness their trouble seem'd,<br>How undelightful their delight;<br>To my necessity how strange<br>The sunshine and the song of birds;<br>How dull the clouds' continual change,<br>How foolishly content the herds;<br>How unaccountable the law<br>Which bade me sit in blindness here,<br>While she, the sun by which I saw,<br>Shed splendour in an idle sphere!<br>And then I kiss'd her stolen glove,<br>And sigh'd to reckon and define<br>The modes of martyrdom in love,<br>And how far each one might be mine.<br>I thought how love, whose vast estate<br>Is earth and air and sun and sea, <br>Encounters oft the beggar's fate,<br>Despised on score of poverty;<br>How Heaven, inscrutable in this,<br>Lets the gross general make or mar<br>The destiny of love, which is<br>So tender and particular;<br>How nature, as unnatural<br>And contradicting nature's source,<br>Which is but love, seems most of all<br>Well-pleased to harry true love's course;<br>How, many times, it comes to pass<br>That trifling shades of temperament,<br>Affecting only one, alas,<br>Not love, but love's success prevent;<br>How manners often falsely paint<br>The man; how passionate respect,<br>Hid by itself, may bear the taint<br>Of coldness and a dull neglect;<br>And how a little outward dust<br>Can a clear merit quite o'ercloud,<br>And make her fatally unjust,<br>And him desire a darker shroud;<br>How senseless opportunity<br>Gives baser men the better chance;<br>How powers, adverse else, agree<br>To cheat her in her ignorance;<br>How Heaven its very self conspires<br>With man and nature against love,<br>As pleased to couple cross desires,<br>And cross where they themselves approve.<br>Wretched were life, if the end were now!<br>But this gives tears to dry despair,<br>Faith shall be blest, we know not how,<br>And love fulfilled, we know not where.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br>II<br>While thus I grieved, and kiss'd her glove,<br>My man brought in her note to say,<br>Papa had bid her send his love,<br>And would I dine with them next day?<br>They had learn'd and practised Purcell's glee,<br>To sing it by to-morrow night.<br>The Postscript was: Her sisters and she<br>Inclosed some violets, blue and white;<br>She and her sisters found them where<br>I wager'd once no violets grew;<br>So they had won the gloves. And there<br>The violets lay, two white, one blue.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Coventry+Patmore">Coventry Patmore</a><div class=q>
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I The Comparison 
Where she succeeds with cloudless brow,
In common and in holy course,
He fails, in spite of prayer and vow
And agonies of faith and force;
Or, if his suit with Heaven prevails
To righteous life, his virtuous deeds
Lack..."></div>
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