people to whom they were addressed. His verses to
Shakespeare and his prose commentaries on him too, are models of what
self-respecting admiration should be, generous in its praise of
excellence, candid in its statement of defects. They are the kind of
compliments that Shakespeare himself, if he had grace enough, must have
loved to receive.

Very different from his direct and dignified manner is the closely
packed style of Donne, who, Milton apart, is the greatest English writer
of the century, though his obscurity has kept him out of general
reading. No poetry in English, not even Browning, is more difficult to
understand. The obscurity of Donne and Browning proceed from such
similar causes that they are worth examining together. In both, as in
the obscure passages in Shakespeare's later plays, obscurity arises not
because the poet says too little but because he attempts to say too
much. He huddles a new thought on the one before it, before the first
has had time to express itself; he sees things or analyses emotions so
swiftly and subtly himself that he forgets the slower comprehensions of
his readers; he is for analysing things far deeper than the ordinary
mind commonly can. His wide and curious knowledge finds terms and
likenesses to express his meaning unknown to us; he sees things from a
dozen points of view at once and tumbles a hint of each separate vision
in a heap out on to the page; his restless intellect finds new and
subtler shades of emotion and thought invisible to other pairs of eyes,
and cannot, because speech is modelled on the average of our
intelligences, find words to express them; he is always trembling on the
brink of the inarticulate. All this applies to both Donne and Browning,
and the comparison could be pushed further still. Both draw the
knowledge which is the main cause of their obscurity from the same
source, the bypaths of mediaevalism. Browning's _Sordello_ is obscure
because he knows too much about mediaeval Italian history; Donne's
_Anniversary_ because he is too deeply read in mediaeval scholasticism
and speculation. Both make themselves more difficult to the reader who
is familiar with the poetry of their contemporaries by the disconcerting
freshness of their point of view. Seventeenth century love poetry was
idyllic and idealist; Donne's is passionate and realistic to the point
of cynicism. To read him after reading Browne or Jonson is to have the
same shock as reading Browning after