country was divided by the struggle for political and religious liberty; and the literature was as divided in spirit as were the struggling parties. (2) Elizabethan literature is generally inspiring; it throbs with youth and hope and vitality.  That which follows speaks of age and sadness; even its brightest hours are followed by gloom, and by the pessimism inseparable from the passing of old standards. (3) Elizabethan literature is intensely romantic; the romance springs from the heart of youth, and believes all things, even the impossible.  The great schoolman’s credo, “I believe because it is impossible,” is a better expression of Elizabethan literature than of mediaeval theology.  In the literature of the Puritan period one looks in vain for romantic ardor.  Even in the lyrics and love poems a critical, intellectual spirit takes its place, and whatever romance asserts itself is in form rather than in feeling, a fantastic and artificial adornment of speech rather than the natural utterance of a heart in which sentiment is so strong and true that poetry is its only expression.

II.  LITERATURE OF THE PURITAN PERIOD

THE TRANSITION POETS.  When one attempts to classify the literature of the first half of the seventeenth century, from the death of Elizabeth (1603) to the Restoration (1660), he realizes the impossibility of grouping poets by any accurate standard.  The classifications attempted here have small dependence upon dates or sovereigns, and are suggestive rather than accurate.  Thus Shakespeare and Bacon wrote largely in the reign of James I, but their work is Elizabethan in spirit; and Bunyan is no less a Puritan because he happened to write after the Restoration.  The name Metaphysical poets, given by Dr. Johnson, is somewhat suggestive but not descriptive of the followers of Donne; the name Caroline or Cavalier poets brings to mind the careless temper of the Royalists who followed King Charles with a devotion of which he was unworthy; and the name Spenserian poets recalls the little band of dreamers who clung to Spenser’s ideal, even while his romantic mediaeval castle was battered down by Science at the one gate and Puritanism at the other.  At the beginning of this bewildering confusion of ideals expressed in literature, we note a few writers who are generally known as Jacobean poets, but whom we have called the Transition poets because, with the later dramatists, they show clearly the changing standards of the age.

SAMUEL DANIEL (1562-1619).  Daniel, who is often classed with the first Metaphysical poets, is interesting to us for two reasons,—­for his use of the artificial sonnet, and for his literary desertion of Spenser as a model for poets.  His Delia, a cycle of sonnets modeled, perhaps, after Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, helped to fix the custom of celebrating love or friendship by a series of sonnets, to which some pastoral pseudonym was affixed.  In his sonnets, many of which rank with Shakespeare’s, and in his later poetry, especially the beautiful “Complaint of Rosamond” and his “Civil Wars,” he aimed solely at grace of expression, and became influential in giving to English poetry a greater individuality and independence than it had ever known.  In matter he set himself squarely against the mediaeval tendency: