The Fletchers are imitators, but imitators of high quality. They lack the positive genius of their model Spenser, but they have intensity, color, melody, and great metrical artistry. =9. John Donne (1573–1631)= was born in London, the son of a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Oxford, and then studied law. Though he entered the public service and served with some distinction, his bent was always theological, and in 1616 he was ordained. In 1621 he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s. Donne’s poetical works are probably more important than those composed in prose, valuable though the latter are. He began poetical composition with _Satires_ (1593), forcible and picturesque, though crabbed and obscure in language. His other poems include _The Progress of the Soul_, his longest poem, composed about 1600; _An Anatomy of the World_ (1611), a wild, exaggerated eulogy of a friend’s daughter, who had just died; and a large number of miscellaneous poems, including songs, sonnets, elegies, and letters in verse. In his nature Donne had a strain of actual genius, but his natural gifts were so obscured with fitful, wayward, and exaggerated mannerisms that for long he was gravely underrated. His miscellaneous poems show his poetical features at their best: a solemn, half-mystical, half-fanatical religious zeal; a style of somber grandeur, shot with piercing gleams of poetical imagery; and an almost unearthly music of word and phrase. Often, and especially in the _Satires_, he is rough and obscure; in thought and expression he is frequently fantastic and almost ludicrous; but at his best, when his stubborn, melancholy humor is fired with his emotional frenzy, he is almost alone in his curious compound of gloom and brilliance, of ice and consuming fire. He is the last of the Elizabethans, and among the first of the coming race of the “Metaphysicals.” His prose works comprise a large number of sermons, a few theological treatises, of which the greatest is _The Pseudo-Martyr_ (1609), and a small number of personal letters. In its peculiar manner his prose is a reflex of his poetry. There is the same soaring and exaggerated imagery, the same fierce pessimism, and often the same obscurity and roughness. In prose his sentences are long and shapeless, but the cadence is rapid and free, and so is suited to the purposes of the sermon. As a brief specimen of his poetical mannerisms, good and bad, we add the following sonnet. The reader will observe the rugged grandeur of the style and the curious intellectual twist that he gives to the general idea of the poem.