The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul’s, whom Dryden pronounced a great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for some things, but likely to be forgotten for want of being understood.  Besides satires and epistles in verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, and divine poems in his age, both kinds distinguished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles.  When this poet has occasion to write a valediction to his mistress upon going into France, he compares their temporary separation to that of a pair of compasses: 

  Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
    Like the other foot obliquely run;
  Thy firmness makes my circle just,
    And makes me end where I begun.

If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her attention to a flea—­

  Me it sucked first and now sucks thee,
  And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and bids her forbear to kill it lest she thereby commit murder, suicide and sacrilege all in one.  Donne’s figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp.  He ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, optics, the canon law, and the divinity of the school-men for ink-horn terms and similes.  He was in verse what Browne was in prose.  He loved to play with distinctions, hyperboles, parodoxes, the very casuistry and dialectics of love or devotion.

Thou canst not every day give me my heart: 
If thou canst give it then thou never gav’st it: 
Love’s riddles are that though thy heart depart
It stays at home, and thou with losing sav’st it.

Donne’s verse is usually as uncouth as his thought.  But there is a real passion slumbering under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasionally a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired lines: 

                  Her pure and eloquent blood
  Spoke in her cheek, and so divinely wrought
  That one might almost say her body thought.

This description of Donne is true, with modifications, of all the metaphysical poets.  They had the same forced and unnatural style.  The ordinary laws of the association of ideas were reversed with them.  It was not the nearest, but the remotest, association that was called up.  “Their attempts,” said Johnson, “were always analytic:  they broke every image into fragments.”  The finest spirit among them was “holy George Herbert,” whose Temple was published in 1633.  The titles in this volume were such as the following:  Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy Baptism, The Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The Holy Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday.  Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble’s Christian Year, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican Church—­the “beauty of holiness”—­found such sweet expression in poetry.  The verses entitled Virtue—­