And you must liue drawne by your owne sweet skill.
In the succeeding age, from the Elizabethans to the Augustans, the same principle may be discovered in the practice of poets as different in their personal quality as, say, Donne, Milton and Lovelace. Donne’s—
By Absence this good means I gain
That I can catch her
Where none can watch her,
In some close corner of my brain:
There I embrace and kiss her
And so enjoy her and none miss her....
may have perplexed his readers by its intellectual turn, but it cannot have seemed anything but easily natural to them in its actual word. If Donne was startling, it was in what he said and not at all in his way of saying it. And so with Milton. Common speech could never put on a sublimer transfiguration than in such passages as—
Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no more,