During the 1850s and 1860s Coventry Patmore was one of the most admired and influential of Victorian poets. The Angel in the House (1858) received critical acclaim, sold more than a quarter of a million copies, and actually challenged the popular supremacy of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1859). It was Patmore who persuaded John Ruskin to defend the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and it was Patmore who invented the "motto of perfection" that the brotherhood eventually adopted: "It is the last rub which polishes the mirror." Indeed, it has been asserted that Patmore successfully competed with the talents of Tennyson, the Brownings, the Rossettis, and Matthew Arnold until he clearly grasped--what in a sense he had always suspected--that his inspiration was somehow essentially different from theirs. His mystical insights paralleled those of St. Bernard, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross; his conversion to Roman Catholicism was gradual...