When God at first made man,
    Having a glass of blessings standing by,
    Let us, said he, pour on him all we can: 
    Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
      Contract into a span. 
     So strength first made a way;
    Then beauty flowed; then wisdom, honor, pleasure. 
    When almost all was out, God made a stay,
    Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
      Rest in the bottom lay. 
     For, if I should, said he,
    Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
    He would adore my gifts instead of me,
    And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: 
      So both should losers be. 
     Yet let him keep the rest,
    But keep them with repining restlessness: 
    Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
    If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
      May toss him to my breast.

Among the poems which may be read as curiosities of versification, and which arouse the wrath of the critics against the whole metaphysical school, are those like “Easter Wings” and “The Altar,” which suggest in the printed form of the poem the thing of which the poet sings.  More ingenious is the poem in which rime is made by cutting off the first letter of a preceding word, as in the five stanzas of “Paradise “: 

    I bless thee, Lord, because I grow
    Among thy trees, which in a row
    To thee both fruit and order ow.

And more ingenious still are odd conceits like the poem “Heaven,” in which Echo, by repeating the last syllable of each line, gives an answer to the poet’s questions.

THE CAVALIER POETS.  In the literature of any age there are generally found two distinct tendencies.  The first expresses the dominant spirit of the times; the second, a secret or an open rebellion.  So in this age, side by side with the serious and rational Puritan, lives the gallant and trivial Cavalier.  The Puritan finds expression in the best poetry of the period, from Donne to Milton, and in the prose of Baxter and Bunyan; the Cavalier in a small group of poets,—­Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, and Carew,—­who write songs generally in lighter vein, gay, trivial, often licentious, but who cannot altogether escape the tremendous seriousness of Puritanism.

THOMAS CAREW (1598?-1639?).  Carew may be called the inventor of Cavalier love poetry, and to him, more than to any other, is due the peculiar combination of the sensual and the religious which marked most of the minor poets of the seventeenth century.  His poetry is the Spenserian pastoral stripped of its refinement of feeling and made direct, coarse, vigorous.  His poems, published in 1640, are generally, like his life, trivial or sensual; but here and there is found one, like the following, which indicates that with the Metaphysical and Cavalier poets a new and stimulating force had entered English literature: