Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/180

160 and many of the best, as "The Anniversary," the wonderful "Ecstasy," "The Funeral," "The Relic," "The Prohibition," preserve throughout this potent and unique impressiveness. Donne's Songs and Sonnets cannot take a place beside the great love-poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare. There is too large an element in them of mere intellectual subtlety, even freakishness. But his poetry is not to be dismissed as the result of conflicting conceptions of nature clashing in a subtle and bizarre intellect. It has a real imaginative as well as historical value, because it is the unique expression of a unique temperament.

The difference between Donne and Jonson comes out very distinctly if we compare their eulogistic verses. The non-dramatic poetry of Jonson is contained in the Epigrams and Forest, which he published in 1616, and the posthumous Underwoods (1640). A large proportion of it, including the best of the epigrams, consists of eulogistic addresses to patrons and friends. Donne's Verse-Letters are of the same kind, and there is abundance of eulogy in his Epithalamia and Epicedes. It is when he is paying compliments that Donne's mind works most abstractly, and that his subtleties are most purely intellectual. In the verses To the Countess of Salisbury, August 1614, beginning "Fair, great and good," he elaborates with the utmost ingenuity the statement that the Countess is super-excellent in a world which has grown utterly corrupt, but he gives no indication of the qualities in which