The school of Donne--the "fantastics" as they
have been called (Dr. Johnson called them the metaphysical poets),
produced in Herbert and Vaughan, our two noblest writers of religious
verse, the flower of a mode of writing which ended in the somewhat
exotic religiousness of Crashaw. In the hands of Cowley the use of
far-sought and intricate imagery became a trick, and the fantastic
school, the soul of sincerity gone out of it, died when he died. To the
followers of Jonson we owe that delightful and simple lyric poetry which
fills our anthologies, their courtly lyricism receiving a new impulse in
the intenser loyalty of troubled times. The most finished of them is
perhaps Carew; the best, because of the freshness and varity of his
subject-matter and his easy grace, Herrick. At the end of them came
Waller and gave to the five-accented rhymed verse (the heroic couplet)
that trick of regularity and balance which gave us the classical school.
(3)
The prose literature of the seventeenth century is extraordinarily rich
and varied, and a study of it would cover a wide field of human
knowledge. The new and unsuspected harmonies discovered by the
Elizabethans were applied indeed to all the tasks of which prose is
capable, from telling stories to setting down the results of speculation
which was revolutionizing science and philosophy.
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