Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/178

158 admit erudite and technical imagery—even though it be only occasionally that one finds again passionate and profound reflection upon the nature and mystery of love. A sonnet like "Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediment," is not less intense or philosophic in its own way than a canzone of the Vita Nuova.

It is this metaphysical, erudite, scholastic strain which Donne, under conditions similar to that in which it first appeared, renewed and heightened. He is hardly less concerned than Dante with the abstract nature of love. The "concetti metafisici ed ideali" of the Anatomy of the World are not more metaphysical and hyperbolical—blasphemous, as Jonson bluntly put it—than those of the canzone in the Vita Nuova, which tells how the saints in heaven beseech God for the presence of Beatrice—

"My lady is desired in the high heaven."

The central idea of the Anatomy of the World, the all-pervading influence of the loved one, is an expansion of one of the conventions of the school of Dante.

But after all there is a vast difference between Donne and Dante. Donne has no consistent metaphysic of love and its place in the upward movement