Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/186

166 preacher in Herbert's quaint, carefully elaborated, effective treatment of the various phases of a single theme, the spiritual lessons and experiences of one who found both discipline and consolation in the theology, sacraments, and symbols of the Anglican church. Like Donne, Herbert rejects the pastoral and allegorical conventions of the Spenserians.

"Who says that fictions only and false hair              Become a verse?  Is there no truth in beauty?               Is all good structure in a winding stair?               May no lines pass except they do their dutie                      Not to a true but painted chair?

Is it no verse except enchanted groves And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines? Must purling streams refresh a lover's love? Must all be vail'd while he that reads divines, Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people: let them sing; Riddle who list for me and pull for prime: I envy no man's nightingale or spring: Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme, Who plainly say, My God! My King!"

Not so subtle and daring as Donne's imagery, Herbert's quaint figures are managed with great rhetorical effectiveness, worked out with an almost Tennysonian lucidity and relevancy, and are often not less beautiful poetically than rhetorically effective, as in, perhaps, the best known of his poems, the lines on Virtue, beginning—

"Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright!"