journalist to whom the vehicle of verse came more easily than the vehicle
of prose, and the dangers of that state of things are well known. A mere
list of his work (the _Enchiridion_ is in prose, and a good thing too)
would far exceed any space that can be given to him here. All Quarles's
work is journey-work, but it is only fair to note the frequent wealth of
fancy, the occasional felicity of expression, which illustrate this
wilderness.

More and Beaumont were not, like Quarles, poetical miscellanists and
periodical writers; but they seem to have shared with him the delusion
that poetry is an instrument of all work. Henry More, a man well
connected and who might have risen, but who preferred to pass the greater
part of a long and studious life as a fellow of Christ's College,
Cambridge, is best known as a member of the theological school,
indifferently called the Cambridge Platonists and the Cambridge
Latitudinarians. His chief work in verse is a great philosophical poem,
entitled the _Song of the Soul_, with such engaging sub-titles as
_Psychozoia_, _Psychathanasia_, _Antipsychopannychia_, and
_Antimonopsychia_. I shall not, I hope, be suspected of being ignorant of
Greek, or disinclined to metaphysics, if I say that the _Song of the
Soul_ appears to me a venerable mistake. A philosophical controversy
carried on in this fashion--

"But contradiction, can that have place
In any soul? Plato affirms ideas;
But Aristotle, with his pugnacious race,
As idle figments stiffly them denies,"

seems to me to be a signal instance of the wrong thing in the wrong place.
It is quite true that More has, as Southey says, "lines and passages of
sublime beauty." A man of his time, actuated by its noble thought, trained
as we know More to have been in the severest school of Spenser, and thus
habituated to the heavenly harmonies of that perfect poet, could hardly
fail to produce such. But his muse is a chaotic not a cosmic one.

Something the same may be said of Joseph Beaumont, a friend of Crashaw, and
like him ejected from Peterhouse, son-in-law of Bishop Wren, and, later,
head of Jesus College. Beaumont, a strong cavalier and an orthodox
churchman, was a kind of adversary of More's, whose length and quaintness
he has exceeded, while he has almost rivalled his learning in _Psyche_ or
_Love's Mystery_, a religious poem of huge dimensions, first published in
1648 and later in 1702. Beaumont, as both fragments of this