in verse or in prose, as the dedication of the State of Innocence to Mary of Modena, are in the same seraphic vein and indeed. contain lines that are boldly 'lifted' from Donne. They are not vivid by the accumulation of concrete details, though there are some not easily to be surpassed, as Ben Jonson's favourite lines:

No need of lanterns, and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday.

But the most vivid impressions are secured not by objective detail, but by the suggestion of their effect upon the mind. The nervous effect of storm and calm is conveyed by Donne's conceits and hyperboles in a way that is not only vivid but intense.

One cannot say much for the metaphysical eulogies of Donne's imitators. Even Professor Saintsbury has omitted many of them from his collection of the other poems by their authors, as Godolphin's lines on Donne and on Sandys's version of the Psalms, which are by no means the worst of their kind. He has, on the other hand, included one, Cleveland's on Edward King, some lines of which might be quoted to illustrate the extravagances of the fashion:

I like not tears in tune, nor do I prize
His artificial grief who scans his eyes.
Mine weep down pious beads, but why should I
Confine them to the Muses' rosary?

I am no poet here; my pen's the spout
Where the rain-water of mine eyes run out
In pity of that name, whose fate we see
Thus copied out in grief's hydrography.
The Muses are not mermaids, though upon
His death the ocean might turn Helicon.

When we have filled the roundlets of our eyes
We'll issue 't forth and vent such elegies

As that our tears shall seem the Irish Seas,
We floating islands, living Hebrides.

The last word recalls the great poem which appeared along with it:

Where ere thy bones are hurl'd,

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world.

Cleveland is not much worse than Joseph Beaumont on the same subject, and neither is quite so offensive as Francis Beaumont in his lines on the death of Mrs. Markham :

As unthrifts grieve in straw for their pawned beds,
As women weep for their lost maidenheads
(When both are without hope of remedy),
Such an untimely grief have I for thee.

It would be difficult to imagine anything in worse taste, yet, from
the frequency with which the poem recurs in manuscript collec-
tions, it was apparently admired as a flight of 'wit'. There are
better elegies than these, as Herrick's and Earle's and Stanley's
on Beaumont and Fletcher, Cleveland's (if it be his) on Jonson,
Carew's noble lines on Donne, but in proportion as they become
readable they cease to be metaphysical.
be metaphysical. Donne's a priori tran-
scendentalism few or none were able to recapture. Their attempts
to rise meet the fate of Icarus. The lesser metaphysical poets
are most happy and most poetical when their theme is not this or
that individual but death in general. Love and death are the
foci round which they moved in eccentric cycles and epicycles.
Their mood is not the sombre mediaeval horror of 'Earth upon
earth', nor the blended horror and fascination of Donne's elegies,
or the more magnificent prose of his sermons. They dwell less in

the Charnel House. Their strain is one of pensive reflection on the fleetingness of life, relieved by Christian resignation and hope:

Like as the damask rose you see,
Or like the blossom on the tree,
Or like the dainty flower in May,
Or like the morning of the day,
Or like the sun, or like the shade,
Or like the gourd which Jonas had—
Even such is man: whose thread is spun,
Drawn out and cut and so is done.

If none can scape Death's dreadful dart,
If rich and poor his beck obey,
If strong, if wise, if all do smart,
Then I to scape shall have no way.
O grant me grace, O God, that I

My life may mend since I must die.

In Abraham Cowley metaphysical' poetry produced its last considerable representative, and a careful study of his poetry reveals clearly what was the fate which overtook it. His wit is far less bizarre and extravagant than much in Donne, to say nothing of Cleveland and Benlowes. But the central heat has died down. Less extravagant, his wit is also less passionate and imaginative. The long wrestle between reason and the imagination has ended in the victory of reason, good sense. subtleties of the schoolmen have for Cowley none of the significance and interest they possessed for Donne:

So did this noble Empire wast,

Sunk by degrees from glories past,

The

And in the School-men's hands it perished quite at last.

Then nought but words it grew,
And those all barbarous too.

It perish❜t and it vanisht there,

The life and soul breath'd out, became but empty air.

The influence of the new philosophy simplified with such dogmatic simplicity by Hobbes has touched him,-atoms and determinism, witness the ode To Mr. Hobbes and the half-playful, charming Destinie; and though that philosophy might appeal to the imagination, the intellectual imagination, by its apparent simplicity and coherency, it could make no such appeal to the spiritual nature as the older, which had its roots in the heart and conscience, which had endeavoured to construct a view of things which should include, which indeed made central, the requirements and values of the human soul. Cowley is not wanting in feeling any more than in fancy, witness his poem On the Death of Mr. William Hervey, and he was a Christian, but neither his affections nor his devotion expressed themselves imaginatively as these feelings did in Donne's most sombre or bizarre verses or those of his spiritual followers; his wit is not the reflection of a sombre or bizarre, a passionately coloured or mystically tinted conception of life and love and death. The fashion of 'metaphysical' wit remains in Cowley's poems when the spirit that gave it colour and music is gone. Yet Cowley's poetry is not merely frigid and fantastic. The mind and temper which his delightful essays, and the poems which accompany them, express has its own real charm-a mind of shy sensitiveness and clear good sense. It was by a natural affinity that Cowley's poetry appealed to Cowper. But wit which is not passionate and imaginative must appeal in some other way, and in Dryden it began to do so by growing eloquent. The interest shifted from thought to form, the expression not the novelty of the thought, wit polished and refined as an instrument of satire and compliment and declamation on themes of common interest. Dryden and Pope brought our witty poetry to a brilliant close. They are the last great poets of an age of intense

intellectual activity and controversy, theological, metaphysical, political. The present age is a little too warlike', Atterbury thought, for blank verse and a great poem. With the peace of the Augustans the mood changed, and poetry, ceasing to be witty, became sentimental; but great poetry is always metaphysical, born of men's passionate thinking about life and love and death.

I have closed my selections from seventeenth-century poetry not with Cowley or Dryden, but with Butler as a reminder of the full significance of the word 'metaphysical', which has a wider connotation than poetry. The century was metaphysical, and the great civil war was a metaphysical war. So many constitutional developments have been the ultimate consequence of the movement which the war began that it has obscured to our eyes the issue as it appeared to the combatants. To them the main issue was not constitutional. Pym and Parliament were more indifferent to the constitution than Charles and Clarendon. Cromwell's army was not inspired by any passion for the constitution; it fought to found the Kingdom of the Saints. Butler's Hudibras is a savage record of what the human spirit had suffered under the tyranny of metaphysical saints.

My selection, like every selection, is a compromise between what one would like to give and what space permits. Inevitably, too, I have omitted one or two poems which on second thoughts I might prefer to some of those included. I regret especially that 'wonderful piece of word-craft', Musics Duel. Such as it is, my selection owes more than I can easily define to the suggestions, encouragement, advice-even when we occasionally differed in opinion and patient scrutiny of the general editor, Mr. David Nichol Smith.