thing to sport with and no danger; on the best authority there were no such personages as these statuesque, delightful old pagan gods, · would that there were! The former was a very different affair; like the wearing of Sunday clothes, a serious matter, and not to be done lightly or altogether comfortably, except for a sustaining sense of decorum. Greatly in contrast is the beautiful and spiritually devoted feeling of Herbert, a man who humbly and devoutly held his poetical gift in trust that he might therewith do the will of God. Izaak Walton's touching account of Herbert's delivery of the manuscript of his book of poetry, The Temple, almost upon his death bed cannot be too often quoted: "He did with so sweet a humility as seemed to exalt him, bow down to Mr. Duncan, and with a thoughtful and contented look, say to him: Sir, O pray deliver this little book to my dear brother, Farrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed twixt God. and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to read it, and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it, for I and it are the least of God's mercies.'"' 1 6 Notwithstanding the richness and variety of the religious and moral poetry that dignifies the age of Elizabeth, the devotional poetry of the reign of Charles gained in fervor and depth of thought. We cannot say that it retained that finish and sense of artistic design which continued longer to pervade secular poetry. The devotional poet has his eye almost wholly upon the subject, and the very spontaneity of his emotions hurries him on if he be less than the greatest -to the facile verbosity of Wither, the metrical lapses of Quarles, or the ruggedness and defective execution of 1 Walton's Lives, Herbert, ed. Morley, p. 277. Vaughan. In a man like Milton the artistic instinct on the other hand is so strong that sincerity of workmanship becomes the feature of his very worship. To praise God with less than the perfection of man's power is impiety, and even the fervor of passion must fall within the controlling regulations of all human activity. Thus it is that in the self-contained and at times to us somewhat cold and austere Miltonic、 poetry, we have really a higher form of worship in art tham we get from didactic Wither, saintlike Herbert, or rapturous Crashaw. In Milton we have the adoration of a great and sincere soul, a man who had known the chastening of adversity, a man who had risked all, and indeed lost much, that he might do the duty nearest him. Let us now consider these products of the devotional poets of the reign of Charles. Quarles and Wither both began writing in the reign of James. If we except the several devotional verse-pamphlets of Nicholas Breton and some others of earlier times, Quarles was one of the first as he long remained by far the most popular of what may be termed the devotional pamphleteers. As early as 1621 he had published his Hadessa, The History of Queen Esther, followed by Sion's Elegies, 1624, Sion's Sonnets, 1625, The Feast for Worms and Job Militant, both in 1626, The History of Samson, 1631, and Divine Fancies in 1632. Many of these works, as their titles indicate, are paraphrases of Biblical story, but in Sion's Elegies and Sion's Sonnets we have the devotional lyric. The idea of the collection of such poems in a sequence Quarles probably derived from Wither's Hymns and Songs of the Church, 1623. Sequences of "divine sonnets," as they were called, had been well known among the writings of men like Constable and Breton before the close of the last century.1 Wither's book "comprehends 1 Cf. Barnes' Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets, 1595, Constable's Spiritual Sonnets, of doubtful date, Breton's The Soul's Harmony, the canonical hymns, and such parcels of Holy Scripture as may properly be sung, with some other ancient songs appropriated to the several tunes and occasions observable in the church of England." There are hymns in the companion volume, Haleluiah, 1641, "When oppressors and wicked men flourish," "for one legally censured, whether justly or unjustly," "for one that is promoted," a "thanksgiving after drought." The fatherly solicitude of this worthy versifier provided for every sort and condition of man, and for every contingency of life. The poet of Fair Virtue, Wither's immortal volume of secular verse, has almost disappeared, except for a certain naïveté and fluency in verse which marks everything that this facile writer touched. All ornament, figure, and epithet have been ruthlessly destroyed, until the verse is as direct and unadorned as the baldest prose, and scarcely more inspired. The following is a fair specimen of this devotional commonplace: O hear us though we still offend, Augment our wasted store; Then give us grace to use it so And that when fuller we shall grow We think not less on thee.1 In most respects no two poets could present more opposite methods than Wither and Quarles. There may be some figures of speech in the devotional verse of Wither — I have Donne's Coronet, and Davies of Herford's Wit's Pilgrimage, 1610, 1611. 1 Haleluiah, Part II, Hymn lxix, ed. Spenser Soc., p. 129. There is some entertaining reading on the function of sacred poetry in Wither's preface to this work. not found them; Quarles is nothing if not abundantly and grotesquely figurative, allegorical, and enigmatic. Wither is direct in construction if garrulous, and of easy flapping, onward flight; Quarles is at times much twisted and contorted, and soars after his kind with absurd intermittent flops and downfalls. Quarles, too, is garrulous; but while Wither is apt to say the same thing about many things, Quarles says a great many things about the same thing. There is a homely sincerity of speech about Wither which is as far above the strained ingenuity of Quarles as it is below the revealing poetical insight of Vaughan The most famous book of Quarles is his Emblems, 1635. It is probable that this was the most popular book of verse published during the century. It is still reprinted for religious edification with a reproduction of the hideous allegorical wood-cuts of the original edition. Although his verse is much overgrown with conceits, repetition, and verbiage, and impaired by slovenly versification (a fault which he shares with contemporaries far greater than he), there is much real poetry in Quarles. In moments of fervid religious excitement the gauds and baubles of his ordinary poetic diction drop away and he writes with manly directness : O whither shall I fly? what path untrod Where shall I sojourn? what kind sea will hide What if my feet should take their hasty flight, 1 Emblems, ed. London, 1823, p. 124, and p. 53, below. Two years earlier Herbert's Temple had appeared and at once taken hold upon the hearts of the readers. George Herbert was a gentleman by birth and a rare scholar; he had been a courtier and a man of the world, so far as that pure and modest spirit could be of the world. Like Quarles, Herbert reached the serious readers of his age with his sincerity, his piety, his rhetorical if somewhat artificial and conceited' style, and his originality of figure. He went much further, for Herbert, whatever be his rank amongst others, is a true poet who, alike in form and spirit, often raises the particular idea into the sphere of the universal and makes it a thing of new beauty and potency. We may pass over the Fourth Part of Castara, 1639–1640, the devotional poetry of which is not without considerable merit, although bookish and imitative, like most of_Habington's work. Of greater interest are the scriptural paraphrases of George Sandys the traveller, including a complete and excellent version of the Psalms, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The dignified original poem Deo Optimo Maximo is a good specimen of the devotional eloquence of Sandys, who appears to have been a man of fine fibre and delicacy of feeling. To Sandys has been assigned the place amongst devotional poets that Waller holds among the amorists: that of a man whose somewhat formal and restrained nature lent itself readily to the reaction in rhetoric and versification which was setting in. Sandys has even been considered "the first of all Englishmen [to make] a uniform practice of writing in heroic couplets which are, on the whole, in accord with the French rule, and which, for exactness of construction, and for harmonious versification, go far towards satisfying the demands of the later 'classical' school in England." Of the absolute incorrectness of this opinion, despite its long entrenchment, 1 See Professor Wood's paper mentioned below, p. lx. |