Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/182

162 Jonson's songs, which are scattered through the plays and masques as well as the above-named collections, have not the passion or subtlety of Donne's, nor the careless note of the very finest Elizabethan songs. They are more consciously elaborated even when most simple, but at their best they have a concentrated sweetness, a unique combination of strength and charm which make Jonson's lyrics unmistakable in any anthology. And their range is very remarkable, from the swing and abandon of "Drink to me only with thine eyes," and the elaborate, Comus-like "Slow, slow fresh fount," to the patter verses of the Gipsies Metamorphosed and delightful snatches like—

"Buz, quoth the blue fly,                                  Hum, quoth the bee,                               Buz and hum they cry,                                   And so do we."

The "metaphysical" turn which Donne gave to "wit" is distinctive of English poetry at this period, and it did not tend to the general improvement of poetic style. The earlier Euphuists, Petrarchists, Arcadians, Lyly and Sidney, Marlowe and Shakespeare, had been mainly concerned with style in their quest of conceits and golden phrases. "The uncontented care to write better than one might" had been the chief source of their beauties and their aberrations. The same care, become a craze for novelty, for new and startling conceits, is the characteristic of Italian Marinism, "the craving to improve upon what is incapable of