"Nature Fulfilled by Grace"

One of the readings from yesterday's Charles Williams' New Christian Year was this two-line gem from Coventry Patmore:

"I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."  Not because they are so unlike your mortal experiences, but because they are so like.

--from The Rod, the Root, and the Flower.

This led me to explore the full-text of The Rod, the Root and the Flower where, so far, I have been delighted to discover that there are more gems where that came from.  The first passage is from the introduction:

A systematic Philosopher, should he condescend to read 

the following notes, will probably 
say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed 
the stars for the first time, " How untidy the 
sky is ! " But who does not know that all philosophies 

have had to pay, for the blessing of 
system, by the curse of barrenness? Sensible 
people will feel shocked at my "paradoxes," 
which, however, are not mine, and are, as Coleridge says, 

the only mode in which realities 
of a certain order can be approximately expressed.

_____

Lovers put out the candles and draw the 
curtains, when they wish to see the god and the 
goddess; and, in the higher Communion, the 

night of thought is the light of perception. 

_____

Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, 
but is supernaturally natural. 

_____

Direct teaching cannot go much beyond pointing out 

the conditions of perception, and the direction 

in which it is to be looked for. 

_____

Goethe said that " God is manifested in ultimates";

that is, in facts of human nature of which 
we not only see no explanation, but also see 

that no explanation is possible. 

_____

The most pregnant passages of Scripture, 

of the wise ancients, and of great poets are those 
which seem to you to have no meaning, or an absurd one. 

_____

"Detachment" consists, not in casting aside 
all natural loves and goods, but in the possession 
of a love and a good so great that all others, 
though they may and do acquire increase through 
the presence of the greater love and good, which 
explains and justifies them, seem nothing in comparison.