e 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 1633. The titles in this
volume were such as the following: Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy
Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures,
Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's
_Christian Year_, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican
Church--the "beauty of holiness"--found such sweet expression in
poetry. The verses entitled _Virtue_--

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

are known to most readers, as well as the line,

Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine.

The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, and the _Pulley_,
are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is
constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from _Whitsunday_,

Listen, sweet dove, unto my song,
And spread thy golden wings on me,
Hatching my tender heart so long,
Till it get wing and fly away with thee,

which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his
contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul

...grew so fast within
It broke the outward shell of sin,
And so was hatched a cherubin.

Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or
Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with
Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Frances Quarles's
_Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers
both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a
figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in
verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The most
famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems.

One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick,
whose