They are the poems of John Donne. Nothing could be further from the manner of Milton, or less likely to overcome his own positive imagination. Here are two examples of Donne's best poetic manner:-- But yet thou canst not die, I know; To leave this world behind, is death; But when thou from this world wilt go, The whole world vapours with thy breath. And again:-- Twice or thrice had I loved thee, Before I knew thy face or name; So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be. Let it be considered what Milton means by the terms "World" and "Angel," how clear an external reality each embodies for him. Any forced comparison used by him is not an attempt to express a subtlety, but merely a vicious trick of the intellect. The virtues of the metaphysical school were impossible virtues for one whose mind had no tincture of the metaphysic. Milton, as has been said already, had no deep sense of mystery. One passage of _Il Penseroso_, which might be quoted against this statement, is susceptible of an easier explanation:-- And if aught else great bards beside In sage and solemn tunes have sung Of turneys, and of trophies hung, Of forests, and enchantments drear, Where more is meant than meets the ear. He alludes no doubt to Spenser, and by the last line intends only allegory--a definite moral signification affixed to certain characters and stories--not the mystic correspondences that Donne loves. The most mysterious lines in _Comus_ are these:-- A thousand fantasies Begin to throng into my memory, Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and shores and desert wildernesses. They are purely Elizabethan and reminiscent. But if the stranger beauties of the metaphysical school were beyond his reach, its vices touched him wonderfully little, so that his conceits are merely the rare flaws of his early work. The dramatists were a much more potent influence than either Spenser or the metaphysical school. He learned his blank verse from the dramatists. Perhaps he took the subject of _Comus_ from the _Old Wives' Tale_ of George Peele; and when he set himself to write a masque he was doubtless well acquainted with the works of the chief master in that kind, Ben Jonson. William Godwin, in his _Lives of Edward and John Phillips_, expresses the opinion that Milton studied the works of Jonson more assiduously than those of any other Elizabethan. The specific evidence that he cites--a few passages of possible reminiscence--is not convincing. He has no more striking coincidence to show than the resemblance between a phrase in _Il Penseroso_:-- Come, but keep thy wonted state and two lines of Jonson's _Hymn to Cynthia_:-- Seated in thy silver chair State in wonted manner keep.