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.