comes near it, but in general seventeenth-century elegy is apt to spend itself on three not easily reconcilable themes--extravagant eulogy of the dead, which is the characteristically Renaissance strain, the Mediaeval meditation on death and its horrors, the more simply Christian mood of hope rising at times to the rapt vision of a higher life. In the pastoral elegy, such as _Lycidas_, the poet was able to escape from a too literal treatment of the first into a sequence of charming conventions. The second was alien to Milton's thought, and with his genius for turning everything to beauty Milton extracts from the reference to the circumstances of King's death the only touch of pathos in the poem: Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, and some of his loveliest allusions: Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks towards _Namancos_ and _Bayona's_ hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth. And, O ye _Dolphins_, waft the hapless youth. In the metaphysical elegy as cultivated by Donne, Beaumont, and others there was no escape from extravagant eulogy and sorrow by way of pastoral convention and mythological embroidery, and this class of poetry includes some of the worst verses ever written. In Donne all three of the strains referred to are present, but only in the third does he achieve what can be truly called poetry. In the elegies on Lord Harington and Miss Boulstred and Lady Markham it is difficult to say which is more repellent--the images in which the poet sets forth the vanity of human life and the humiliations of death or the frigid and blasphemous hyperboles in which the virtues of the dead are eulogized. Even the _Second Anniversary_, the greatest of Donne's epicedes, is marred throughout by these faults. There is no stranger poem in the English language in its combination of excellences and faults, splendid audacities and execrable extravagances. 'Fervour of inspiration, depth and force and glow of thought and emotion and expression'--it has something of all these high qualities which Swinburne claimed; but the fervour is in great part misdirected, the emotion only half sincere, the thought more subtle than profound, the expression heated indeed but with a heat which only in passages kindles to the glow of poetry. Such are the passages in which the poet contemplates the joys of heaven. There is nothing more instinct with beautiful feeling in _Lycidas_ than some of the lines of Apocalyptic imagery at the close: There entertain him all the Saints above, In solemn troops, and sweet Societies That sing, and singing in their glory move, And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes.