Critical remarks are not easily understood without examples; and I have therefore collected instances of the modes of writing by which this species of poets (for poets they were called by themselves and their admirers) was eminently distinguished.
As the authors of this race were perhaps more desirous of being admired than understood, they sometimes drew their conceits from recesses of learning not very much frequented by common readers of poetry. Thus, Cowley on Knowledge:
The sacred tree ’midst the fair orchard grew;
The phœnix truth did on it rest,
And built his perfumed nest,
That right Porphyrian tree which did true logic show.
Each leaf did learned notions give,
And the apples were demonstrative;
So clear their colour and divine,
The very shads they cast did other lights outshine.
On Anacreon continuing a lover in his old age:
Love was with thy life entwined,
Close as heat with fire is join’d;
A powerful brand prescribed the date
Of thine, like Meleager’s fate.
Th’ antiperistasis of age
More enflam’d thy amorous rage.
In the following verses we have an allusion to a rabbinical opinion concerning manna:
Variety I ask not: give me one
To live perpetually upon.
The person Love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it.
Thus Donne shows his medicinal knowledge in some encomiastic verses:
In everything there naturally grows
A balsamum to keep it fresh and new,
If ’twere not injured by extrinsic blows:
Your youth and beauty are this balm in you.
But you, of learning and religion,
And virtue and such ingredients, have made
A mithridate, whose operation
Keeps off, or cures what can be done or said.
Though the following lines of Donne, on the last night of the year, have something in them too scholastic, they are not inelegant: