body. George Herbert and others made
anagrams, and verses shaped like an altar, a cross, or a pair of Easter
wings. This group of poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of
Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics have preferred to call
them the fantastic or conceited school, the later Euphuists or the
English Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino and Gongora,
who brought this fashion to its extreme in Italy and in Spain. The
English _conceptistas_ were mainly clergymen of the established church:
Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman
Catholic, and Cowley--the latest of them--a layman.

The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne, Dean 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 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 school-men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was in verse what
Browne was in prose. He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles,
parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.

Thou canst not every day give me my 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 a
pure flam