is taken by images drawn from all the sciences of the day, from the definitions and distinctions of the Schoolmen, from the travels and speculations of the new age, and (as in Shakespeare's tragedies or Browning's poems) from the experiences of everyday life. Maps and sea discoveries, latitude and longitude, the phoenix and the mandrake's root, the Scholastic theories of Angelic bodies and Angelic knowledge, Alchemy and Astrology, legal contracts and _non obstantes_, 'late schoolboys and sour prentices,' 'the king's real and his stamped face'--these are the kind of images, erudite, fanciful, and homely, which give to Donne's poems a texture so different at a first glance from the florid and diffuse Elizabethan poetry, whether romantic epic, mythological idyll, sonnet, or song; while by their presence and their abundance they distinguish it equally (as Mr. Gosse has justly insisted) from the studiously moderate and plain style of 'well-languaged Daniel'. But if the imagery of Donne's poetry be less classical than that of Marlowe or the younger Shakespeare there is no poet the spirit of whose love-poetry is so classical, so penetrated with the sensual, realistic, scornful tone of the Latin lyric and elegiac poets. If one reads rapidly through the three books of Ovid's _Amores_, and then in the same continuous rapid fashion the _Songs_ and the _Elegies_ of Donne, one will note striking differences of style and treatment. Ovid develops his theme simply and concretely, Donne dialectically and abstractly. There is little of the ease and grace of Ovid's verses in the rough and vehement lines of Donne's _Elegies_. Compare the song, Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, with the famous thirteenth Elegy of the first book, Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito, Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem. Ovid passes from one natural and simple thought to another, from one aspect of dawn to another equally objective. Donne just touches one or two of the same features, borrowing them doubtless from Ovid, but the greater part of the song is devoted to the subtle and extravagant, if you like, but not the less passionate development of the thought that for him the woman he loves is the whole world.