"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 1631. 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," etc.
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, the Pulley, are full of deep thought and spiritual {146} 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. Francis Quarles' 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.