CHAPTER IX.

THE SO-CALLED METAPHYSICAL POETS. A. D. 1600-1700.

§ 1. Characteristics of the so-called metaphysical poets. § 2. Wither and QUARLES. . § 3. HERBERT and CRASHAW. § 4. HERRICK, SUCKLING, and LOVELACE. § 5. BROWNE and HABINGTON. § 6. WALLER. § 7. DAVENANT and DENHAM. § 8. COWLEY.

§ 1. THE seventeenth century is one of the most momentous in English history. A large portion of it is occupied by an immense fermentation, political and religious, through which were worked out many of those institutions to which the country owes its grandeur and its happiness. The Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, and the Restoration, fill up the space extending from 1630 to 1660, while its termination was signalized by another revolution, which, though peaceful and bloodless, was destined to exert a perhaps even more beneficial influence on the future fortunes of the country. In its literary aspect this agitated epoch, though not marked by that marvellous outburst of creative power which dazzles us in the reigns of Elizabeth and her successor, yet has left deep traces on the turn of thought and expression of the English people; and confining ourselves to the department of poetry, and excluding the solitary example in Milton of a poet of the first class, who will form the subject of a separate study, we may say that this period introduced a class of excellent writers in whom the intellect and the fancy play a greater part than sentiment or passion. Ingenuity predominates over feeling; and while Milton owed much to many of these poets, whom I have ventured, in accordance with Johnson, to style the metaphysical class, nevertheless we must allow that they had much to do with generating the so-called correct and artificial manner which distinguishes the classical writers of the age of William, Anne, and the first George. I propose to pass in rapid review, and generally according to chronological order, the most striking names of this department, extending from about 1600 to 1700.

§ 2. GEORGE WITHER (1588-1667) and FRANCIS QUARLES (15921644) are a pair of poets whose writings have a considerable degree of .esemblance in manner and subject, and whose lives were similar in misfortune. Wither took an active part in the Civil War, attained command under the administration of Cromwell, and had to undergo severe persecution and long imprisonment. His most important work is a collection of poems, of a partially pastoral character, entitled the Shepherd's Hunting, in which the reader will find frequent rural dezcriptions of exquisite fancifulness and beauty, together with a sweet und pure tone of moral reflection. The vice of Wither, as it was generally of the literature of his age, was a passion for ingenious tur

and unexpected conceits, which bear the same relation to really beautiful thoughts that plays upon words do to true wit. He is also often singularly deficient in taste, and frequently deforms graceful images by the juxtaposition of what is merely quaint, and is sometimes even ignoble. Many of his detached lyrics are extremely beautiful, and the verse is generally flowing and melodious; but in reading his best passages we are always nervously apprehensive of coming at any moment tipon something which will jar upon our sympathy. He wrote, among many other works, a curious series of Emblems, in which his puritanical enthusiasm revels in a system of moral and theological analogies at least as far-fetched as poetical. Quarles, though a Royalist as ardent as Wither was a devoted Republican, exhibits many points of intellectual Jesemblance to Wither; to whom, however, he was far inferior in Foetical sentiment. One of his most popular works is a collection of Divine Emblems, in which moral and religious precepts are inculcated in short poems of a most quaint character, and illustrated by engravings filled with what may be called allegory run mad. For example, the text, "Who will deliver me from the body of this death?" is accompanied by a cut representing a diminutive human figure, typifying the soul, peeping through the ribs of a skeleton as from behind the bars of a dungeon. This taste for extravagant yet prosaic allegory was borrowed from the laborious ingenuity of the Dutch and Flemish moralists and divines; and Otto Van Veen, the teacher of Rubens, is answerable for some of the most extravagant pictorial absurdities of this nature. Quarles, however, in spite of his quaintness, is not destitute of the feeling of a true poet; and many of his pieces breathe an intense spirit of religious fervor. In spite of their antagonism in politics, Quarles and Wither bear a strong resemblance: the one may be designated as the most roundhead of the Cavaliers, the other as the most cavalier of the Roundheads.

§ 3. If Quarles and Wither represent ingenuity carried to extravagance, GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1632) and RICHARD CRASHAW (circa 1620-1650) exhibit the highest exaltation of religious sentiment, and are both worthy of admiration, not only as Christian poets, but as good men and pious priests. George Herbert was born in 1593, and at first rendered himself remarkable by the graces and accomplishments of the courtly scholar; but afterwards entering the Church, exhibited, as parish priest of Bemerton in Wiltshire, all the virtues which can adorn the country parson - a character he has beautifully described in a prose. treatise under that title. He died in 1632, and was known among his contemporaries as "holy George Herbert." He was certainly one of the most perfect characters which the Anglican Church has nourished in her bosom. His poems, principally religious, are generally short lyrics, combining pious aspiration with frequent and beautiful pictures of nature. He decorates the altar with the sweetest and most fragrant flowers of fancy and of wit. Herbert's poems are not devoid of that strange and perverted ingenuity with which I have reproached Quarles and Wither; but the tender unction which reigns throughout his lyricu

serves as a kind of antidote to the poison of perpetual conceits. In his most successful efforts he has almost attained the perfection of devotional poetry, a calm and yet ardent glow, a well-governed fervor, which seem peculiarly to belong to the Church of which he was minister, equally removed from the pompous and childish enthusiasta of Catholic devotion and the gloomy mysticism of Calvinistic piety. His best collection of sacred lyrics is entitled the Temple, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.

Crashaw's short life was glowing throughout with religious enthusiasm. The date of his birth is not exactly known, but probably was abou1 1620; and he died, a canon of the Cathedral of Loretto, in 1650. He was brought up in the Anglican Church, and received a learned education at Oxford; but during the Puritan troubles he embraced the Romish faith, and carried to the ancient Church a singularly sensitive mind, very extensive erudition, and a gentle but intense devotional mysticism. He had been employed in negotiation by Charles I., and seems to have possessed among his contemporaries a high reputation for ability. The mystical tendency of his mind was increased by his misfortunes and by his change of religion, and in his later works we find the fervor of his pietism reaching a pitch little short of extravagance. He is said to have been an ardent admirer of the ecstatic writings of St. Theresa; and that union of the sensuous fervor of human affection with the wildest flights of theological rapture which we see in the writings of the great Catholic mystics, is faithfully reproduced in Crashaw. That he possessed an exquisite fancy, great melody of verse, and that power over the reader which nothing can replace, and which springs from deep earnestness, no one can deny. The reader will never regret the time he may have employed in making some acquaintance with Crashaw's poetry, among the most favorable specimens of which I may cite the Steps to the Temple, and the beautiful description entitled Music's Duel, borrowed from the celebrated Contention between a Nightingale and a Musician, composed by Famianus Strada, of which there is a most exquisite imitation in Ford's play of the Lover's Melancholy.

§ 4. Love, romantic loyalty, and airy elegance find their best representatives in three charming poets whose works may be examined under one general head. These are ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674), SIR JOHN SUCKLING (1609–1641), and SIR RICHARD LOVELACE (16181658). The first of these writers, after beginning his career among the brilliant but somewhat debauched literary society of the town and the theatre, took orders, and, like Herbert, passed the latter portion of his life in the obscurity of a country parish. Unlike Herbert, however, he continued to exhibit in his writings, after this change of life, the same graceful but voluptuous spirit which distinguished his early writings; and unlike the holy pastor of Bemerton, he seems never to have ceased repining at the fate which obliged him to exchange the gay conversation of poets and wits for the unsympathizing companionship of the rural "salvages" among whom he was condemned to live. His poems

are all lyric, generally songs; and love and wine form their invariable topics. In Herrick we find the most unaccountable mixture of sensual coarseness with exquisite refinement. Like the Faun of the ancient sculpture, his Muse unites the bestial and the divine. In fancy, in genius, in power over the melody of verse, he is never deficient; and it is easy to see that in his union of tenderness with richness of imagination he had been inspired by the lovely pastoral and lyric movements of Fletcher and of Heywood. Suckling and Lovelace are the types of the Cavalier poet: both underwent persecution, and were reduced to poverty. Lovelace was long and often imprisoned for his adherence to the loyal doctrines of his party, and is said to have died in abject distress. Both were men of elegant if not profound scholarship, and both exemplify the spirit of loyalty to their king, and gallantry to the ladies. Many of Suckling's love songs are equal, if not superior, to the most beautiful examples of that mixture of gay badinage and tender if not very deep-felt devotion which characterizes French courtly and erotic poetry in the seventeenth century; and his thoughts are expressed with that cameo-like neatness and refinement of expression which is the great merit of the minor French literature from Marot to Béranger. But his most exquisite production is his Ballad upon a Wedding, in which, assuming the character of a rustic, he describes the marriage of a fashionable couple, Lord Broghill and Lady Margaret Howard. In this inimitable gern, if we exclude one or two allusions of a somewhat too warm complexion, the reader will find the perfection of grace and elegance, rendered only the more piquant by the well-assumed naïveté of the style. Lovelace is more serious and earnest than Suckling: his lyrics breathe rather devoted loyalty than the half-passionate, halfjesting love-fancy of his rival. Some of his most charming lyrics were written in prison; and the beautiful lines to Althea, composed when the author was closely confined in the Gate-house at Westminster, remind us of the caged bird which learns its sweetest and most plaintive notes when deprived of its woodland liberty.

The gay and airy spirit which we see running through the minor poetry of this epoch may be traced back to a period considerably earlier to the contemporaries of Ben Jonson and the great dramatists. The pleasant and facetious BISHOP CORBET (p. 86), Carew, one of the ornaments of the court of Charles I. (p. 86), and even Drummond (p. 87), though the genius of the latter is of a more serious turn, all exhibit a tendency to intellectual ingenuity which was afterwards grad ually divested of that somewhat pedantic character which Drummond, for example, had imbibed from his models, the masters of the Italian sonnet. It is curious to observe that the Scots should in this time have distinguished themselves in their writings by a learned and artificially classical spirit strangely at variance with the unadorned graces of the "native woodnotes wild" that thrill so sweetly through their national and popular songs. This learned character was perhaps derived from, as it is chiefly exemplified in, Buchanan, one of the purest and most truly classical writers in Latin verse among those who have appeared

since the destruction of Roman literature (p. 107). The Scots have generally been a learned people, and much of their national annals was written in Latin, sometimes in Latin of great elegance. This may perhaps be in some degree attributed to the fact that their vernacular dialect, when they employed it, was, though certainly far too cultivated to be stigmatized as a pators of English, yet at all events no better than a provincial mode of speech; and the naïveté which is charming in a song or poem runs great risk of exciting contempt when coloring historical or philosophical matter.

§ 5. WILLIAM BROWNE (1590-1645) was the author, besides a large number of graceful lyrics and shorter poems, of a work entitled Britannia's Pastorals, undoubtedly suggested, as far as their style and treatinent are concerned, by the example of Spenser and Giles Fletcher. They contain much agreeable description of rural life, but they are chargeable with that ineradicable defect which accompanies all idyllic poetry, however beautiful may be its details, namely, the want of probability in the scenes and characters, when the reader tests them by a reference to his own experience of what rustic life really is. His verse is almost uniformly well knit, easy, and harmonious; and the attentive reader could select many passages from this poet, now little read, exhibiting great felicity of thought and expression.

WILLIAM HABINGTON (1605-1654) is a poet of about the same calibre as Browne, though his writings are principally devoted to love. He celebrates, with much ingenuity and occasional grace, the charms and virtues of a lady whom he calls Castara, and who—a fate rare in the annals of the love of poets - was not only his ideal mistress, but his wife. Habington, like Crashaw, was a Catholic; and his poems are free from that immorality which so often stains the graceful fancies of the poets of this age. Though generally devoted to love, Habington's collected works exhibit some of a moral and religious tendency.

§ 6. The most prominent and popular figures of the period we are now considering, and the writers who exerted the strongest influence on their own time, I have reserved till the end of this chapter: they are Waller and Cowley, to which may be added the secondary but stil important names of Denham and Davenant.

EDMUND WALLER (1605-1687) was unquestionably one of the leading characters in the literary and political history of England during the momentous period embraced by his long life. He was of ancient and dignified family, of great wealth, and a man of varied accomplishments and fascinating manners; but his character was timid and selfish, and ais political principles fluctuated with every change that menaced either his safety or his interest. He sat for many years in Parliament, and was the "darling of the House of Commons" for the readiness of his repartees and the originality and pleasantness of his speeches. It was unfortunate for a man endowed with the light talents formed to adorn a court to be obliged to take part in public affairs at so serious a crisis as that of the Long Parliament, the Civil War, and the Restoration; but Waller seems for a while to have floated scathless through