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_-- Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, are known to most readers, as well as the line, Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine. The quaintly named pieces, the _Elixir_, the _Collar_, and the _Pulley_, are full of deep thought and spiritual feeling. But Herbert's poetry is constantly disfigured by bad taste. Take this passage from _Whitsunday_, Listen, sweet dove, unto my song, And spread thy golden wings on me, Hatching my tender heart so long, Till it get wing and fly away with thee, which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph written by his contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir Thomas Wentworth, whose soul ...grew so fast within It broke the outward shell of sin, And so was hatched a cherubin. Another of these church poets was Henry Vaughan, "the Silurist," or Welshman, whose fine piece, the _Retreat_, has been often compared with Wordsworth's _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. Frances Quarles's _Divine Emblems_ long remained a favorite book with religious readers both in old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The most famous of them all were Jacob Catt's Dutch emblems. One of the most delightful of the English lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose _Hesperides_, 1648, has lately received such sympathetic illustration from the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E.A. Abbey. Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The most quoted of his religious poems is, _How to Keep a True Lent._ But it may be doubted whether his tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry certainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and his boon companion at