r sometime like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world,
And mock our eyes with air: thou hast seen these signs;
They are black Vesper's pageants.

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
Ge