Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/194

174 Such audacious ecstasies transcend the limits of average humanity, which is more at home with the fearful joys of Herbert and Vaughan, or the more sensuous and remote ecstasies of Crashaw, but they are not in Traherne less profoundly religious. As an artist Traherne is not studious of phrase, or conceit, or cadence. He has absolutely none of the merely rhetorical metaphysics of Cowley, from whose Pindarics he may have derived the structure of his more elaborate strains. His poetry is metaphysical because the thought is so; but the expression is perfectly simple and natural, at times too expository and direct, and marred by a frequent use of the expletive "do," but often kindled into felicity by the ecstasy of the poet. Individual poems of striking interest are "Silence," "The Choice," "The Anticipation," "The Circulation," "On News"; but Traherne's excellencies are scattered through all his work.

Herbert and the religious lyrists of the school of Donne voiced the serious spirit of the court party, the Anglicanism of Andrewes and Laud. Herbert, indeed, was hardly less influential than her great