Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/86

 impulse into a logical formula at the price of crabbed obscurity. But in the prose the two faculties play freely into each other's hands. There is a crowd and rush of thoughts and illustrations. His subtle intellect evolves endless distinctions and startling paradoxes and quaint analogies so abundantly, that he might apparently have preached for a week as easily as for an hour. He takes up one fancy after another, and revels in various applications till the display becomes astonishing. His most famous predecessor, Andrewes, was perhaps equally learned and logically subtle; but—so far as I have been able to get, not, I confess, very far—his desire to be logically convincing overweights him and keeps him to the earth. Jeremy Taylor, Donne's greatest successor, can yield frankly to his imagination, and takes daring flights into the region of pure poetry. Donne represents the fusion of the two faculties. He conscientiously begins his sermons by laying down his logical framework. Any text on his method may serve, as he says of one, for introducing a lecture upon grammar logic, ethic, rhetoric, or philosophy; though, of course, every clause, or even single word, may have to be strangely tortured and sublimated