Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/184

164 as judged, say, from the eulogistic poetry produced in such abundance, is lower than that which had been reached at the close of the sixteenth century.

What was best done was in lyrical poetry, in which the influence of Donne and Jonson appears both blended and distinct. Donne's closest followers are the devout Anglican poets. They strike the same deep personal note; and the wide range of metaphysical imagery gratified their taste for quaint analogies, for symbols, and for points rhetorically effective rather than purely poetic. The courtiers, too, could turn metaphysical images to their service in compliment and badinage—

"Ask me no more whither do stray                  The golden atoms of the day,                   For in pure love heaven did prepare                   Those powders to enrich your hair."

But Jonson is their leader in courtly eulogy; a great deal of their imagery is, like his, a blend of Petrarchian and classical; their sentiment, though touched occasionally with the Platonism which the Queen brought over from the Hôtel de Rambouillet, is in general pagan and sensuous rather than Petrarchian or ideal.

This lyrical poetry, grave or gay, pagan or devout, was the product of the halcyon years which preceded the storm that broke when the Long Parliament met, and it reflects the spirit, not of the nation at large, but of the court of Charles, its gaiety and love-making on the one hand, its concern for Catholic doctrine and decent services on the other, its self-centred indifference to what was