From Chaucer to Tennyson
bowed the head and broke its stock; and at night, having lost some of
its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and
outworn faces."
With the progress of knowledge and discussion many kinds of prose
literature, which were not absolutely new, now began to receive wider
extension. Of this sort are the _Letters from Italy_, and other
miscellanies included in the _Reliquiae Wottonianae_, or remains of Sir
Henry Wotton, English embassador at Venice in the reign of James I., and
subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the _Table Talk_--full of
incisive remarks--left by John Selden, whom Milton pronounced the first
scholar of his age, and who was a distinguished authority in legal
antiquities and international law, furnished notes to Drayton's
_Polyolbion_, and wrote upon Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel
marbles. Literary biography was represented by the charming little
_Lives_ of good old Izaak Walton, the first edition of whose _Compleat
Angler_ was printed in 1653. The lives were five in number; of Hooker,
Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several of these were personal
friends of the author, and Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle.
The _Compleat Angler_, though not the first piece of sporting literature
in English, is unquestionably the most popular, and still remains a
favorite with "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in
Providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As in Ascham's
_Toxophilus_, the instruction is conveyed in dialogue form, but the
technical part of the book is relieved by many delightful digressions.
Piscator and his friend Venator pursue their talk under a honeysuckle
hedge or a sycamore-tree during a passing shower. They repair, after the
day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, with lavender in the window and
a score of ballads stuck about the wall, where they sing
catches--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely good"--composed by the
author or his friends, drink barley wine, and eat their trout or chub.
They encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give them a draft of the
red cow's milk and they never cease their praises of the angler's life,
of rural contentment among the cowslip meadows, and the quiet streams of
Thames, or Lea, or Shawford Brook.
The decay of a great literary school is usually signalized by the
exaggeration of its characteristic traits. The manner of the Elizabethan
poets was pushed into mannerism by their successors. That manner, at its
best, was hardly a simple one, but in the Stuart and Commonwealth
writers it became mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher--a cousin
of the dramatist--composed a long Spenserian allegory, the _Purple
Island_, descriptive of the human body. George Herbert and others made
anagrams, and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter
wings. This group of poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of
Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics have preferred to call
them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists or the
English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora,
who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain. The
English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen of the established church:
Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman
Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of them--a layman.
The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, whom
Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Jonson
esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be
forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and epistles in
verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine poems in his
age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched
ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles. When this poet has
occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France,
he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses:
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--
Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to
kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide and sacrilege all in
one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He ransacked
cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity
of the school-men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what
Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles,
parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.
Thou canst not every day give me my heart:
If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it:
Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart
It stays at home, and thou with losing sav'st it.
Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a real
passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a
pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines:
Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought.
This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the
metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The
ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It
was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.
"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: they broke every
image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George
Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1633. The titles in this
volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy
Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures,
Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's
_Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican
Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression in
poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_--
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
are known to most readers, as well as the line,
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.
The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, and the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is
constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from _Whitsunday_,
Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,
which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his
contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul
...grew so fast within
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin.
Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or
Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Frances Quarles's
_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers
both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a
figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in
verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The most
famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.
One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick,
whose _Hesperides_, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic
illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A. Abbey.
Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the
Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The
most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a True Lent._ But it
may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry
certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon
companion at
...those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun;
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad.
And yet each verse of thine,
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
Herrick's _Noble Numbers_ seldom rises above the expression of a
cheerful gratitude and contentment. He had not the subtlety and
elevation of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, melody,
sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse of his verse. The conceits of
the metaphysical school appear in Herrick only in the form of an
occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of English parish festivals
and of English flowers, the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil. He
sang the praises of the country life, love songs to "Julia," and hymns
of thanksgiving for simple blessings. He has been called the English
Catullus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of _Carpe diem_ and
regret at the shortness of life and youth in many of his best-known
poems, such as _Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may_, and _To Corinna, To
Go a Maying._
Richard Crashaw was a Cambridge scholar who was turned out of his
fellowship at Peterhouse by the Puritans in 1644, for refusing to
subscribe the Solemn League and Covenant; became a Roman Catholic, and
died in 1650 as a canon of the Virgin's Chapel at Loretto. He is best
known to the general reader by his _Wishes for his Unknown Mistress_,
That not impossible she
which is included in most of the anthologies. His religious poetry
expresses a rapt and mystical piety, fed on the ecstatic visions of St.
Theresa, "undaunted daughter of desires," who is the subject of a
splendid apostrophe in his poem, _The Flaming Heart_. Crashaw is, in
fact, a poet of passages and of single lines, his work being exceedingly
uneven and disfigured by tasteless conceits. In one of his Latin
epigrams occurs the celebrated line upon the miracle at Cana:
Vidit et erubuit nympha pudica Deum:
as englished by Dryden,
The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed.
Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for his poetry than for his
pleasant volume of essays, published after the Restoration; but he was
thought in his own time a better poet than Milton. His collection of
love songs--the _Mistress_--is a mass of cold conceits, in the
metaphysical manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey have much
dignity and natural feeling. He introduced the Pindaric ode into
English, and wrote an epic poem on a biblical subject--the
_Davideis_--now quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist, and followed
the exiled court to France.
Side by side with the church poets were the cavaliers--Carew, Waller,
Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others--gallant courtiers and
officers in the royal army, who mingled love and loyalty in their
strains. Colonel Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's
service, and was several times imprisoned, wrote two famous songs--_To
Lucasta on going to the Wars_--in which occur the lines,
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more--
and to _Althaea from Prison_, in which he sings "the sweetness, mercy,
majesty, and glories" of his king, and declares that "stone-walls do not
a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cavaliers was Sir
John Suckling, who formed a plot to rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised
a troop of horse for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament and
fled to France. He was a man of wit and pleasure, who penned a number of
gay trifles, but has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exquisite
_Ballad upon a Wedding_. Thomas Carew and Edmund Waller were poets of