of St. Paul's,
whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben
Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely
to be forgotten for want of being understood. Besides satires and
epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine
poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity,
and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles.
When this poet has occasion to write a valediction {144} to his
mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation
to that of a pair of compasses:

"Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like the other foot obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun."

If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea--

"Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be."

He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to
kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in
one. Donne's figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He
ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and
the divinity of the schoolmen for ink-horn terms and similes. He was
in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions,
hyperboles, paradoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or
devotion.

"Thou canst not every day give me thy heart:
If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it;
Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart,
It stays at home and thou with losing sav'st it."

Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his thought. But there is a
real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and
occasionally {145} a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired
lines:

"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought
That one might almost say her body thought."

This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the
metaphysical poets. They had the same forced and unnatural style. The
ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them. It
was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.
"Their attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: they broke every
image into fragments." The finest spirit among them was "holy George
Herbert," whose _Temple_ was published in 1631. The titles in this