ong from _Twelfth Night_ give
an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the
present as opposed to an elusive future:--

"What is love? 'tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter."

[Illustration: JOHN DONNE. _From the painting ascribed to Cornelius
Jansen, South Kensington Museum._]

Two of the later Elizabethan poets, Ben Jonson and John Donne
(1573-1631), specially impress us by their efforts to secure ingenious
effects in verse. Ben Jonson often shows this tendency, as in trying
to give a poetic definition of a kiss as something--

"So sugar'd, so melting, so soft, so delicious,"

and in showing so much ingenuity of expression in the cramping limits
of an epitaph:--

"Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die,
Which in life did harbor give
To more virtue than doth live."

The poet most famous for a display of extreme ingenuity in verse is
John Donne, a traveler, courtier, and finally dean of St. Paul's
Cathedral, who possessed, to quote his own phrase, an "hydroptic
immoderate desire of human learning." He paid less attention to
artistic form than the earlier Elizabethans, showed more cynicism,
chose the abstract rather than the concrete, and preferred involved
metaphysical thought to simple sensuous images. He made few references
to nature and few allusions to the characters of classical mythology,
but searched for obscure likenesses between things, and for conceits
or far-fetched comparisons. In his poem, _A Funeral Elegy_, he shows
these qualities in characterizing a fair young lady as:--

"One whose clear body was so pure and thin,
Because it need disguise no thought within;
'Twas but a through-light scarf her mind to enroll,
Or exhalation breathed out from her soul."

The idea in Shakespeare's simpler expression, "the heavenly rhetoric
of thine eye," was expanded by Donne into:--

"Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string."

Donne does not always show so much fine-spun ingenuity, but this was
the quality most imitated by a group of his successors. His claim to
distinction rests on the originality and ingenuity of his verse, and
perhaps still more on his influence over succeeding poets.[5]

EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599

[Illustration: EDMUND SPENSER._From a painting in Duplin Castle_.]

Life and Minor Poems.--For one hundred and fifty-two years after
Chaucer's death, in 1400, England had no gre