Stay for me there; I will not faile To meet thee in that hollow Vale. And think not much of my delay; I am already on the way, And follow thee with all the speed Desire can make, or sorrows breed. Each minute is a short degree, And ev'ry houre a step towards thee. At night when I betake to rest, Next morn I rise nearer my West Of life, almost by eight houres sail, Than when sleep breath'd his drowsy gale. . . . But heark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum Beats my approach, tells _Thee_ I come; And slow howere my marches be, I shall at last sit down by _Thee._ (In the last few lines there is that effect of terror which is several times attained by one of Bishop King's admirers, Edgar Poe.) Again, we may justly take these quatrains from Lord Herbert's Ode, stanzas which would, we think, be immediately pronounced to be of the metaphysical school:-- So when from hence we shall be gone, And be no more, nor you, nor I, As one another's mystery, Each shall be both, yet both but one. This said, in her up-lifted face, Her eyes, which did that beauty crown, Were like two starrs, that having faln down, Look up again to find their place: While such a moveless silent peace Did seize on their becalmed sense, One would have thought some influence Their ravished spirits did possess. There is nothing in these lines (with the possible exception of the stars, a simile not at once grasped, but lovely and justified) which fits Johnson's general observations on the metaphysical poets in his essay on Cowley. A good deal resides in the richness of association which is at the same time borrowed from and given to the word "becalmed"; but the meaning is clear, the language simple and elegant. It is to be observed that the language of these poets is as a rule simple and pure; in the verse of George Herbert this simplicity is carried as far as it can go--a simplicity emulated without success by numerous modern poets. The _structure_ of the sentences, on the other hand, is sometimes far from simple, but this is not a vice; it is a fidelity to thought and feeling. The effect, at its best, is far less artificial than that of an ode by Gray. And as this fidelity induces variety of thought and feeling, so it induces variety of music. We doubt whether, in the eighteenth century, could be found two poems in nominally the same metre, so dissimilar as Marvell's "Coy Mistress" and Crashaw's "Saint Teresa"; the one producing an effect of great speed by the use of short syllables, and the other an ecclesiastical solemnity by the use of long ones:-- Love, thou art absolute sole lord Of life and death.