ndignant satire, and sublime faith.
Much of it they admired, but their admiration was tempered with
fear. They heard therein the tones of violent generations,--of men whose
intensity, though yielding extraordinary beauty and grandeur, yielded
also obscurity and extravagance; men whom the love of women too often
impelled to utter fantastic hyperbole, and the love of honor to glorify
preposterous adventures; quarrelsome men, who assailed their opponents
with rancorous personalities; doctrinaires, who employed their fiery
energy of mind in the creation of rigid systems of religion and
government; uncompromising men, who devoted to the support of those
systems their fortunes and lives, drenched the land in the blood of a
civil war, executed a king, presently restored his dynasty, and finally
exiled it again, thus maintaining during half a century a general
insecurity of life and property which checked the finer growths of
civilization. Their successors trusted that the compromise of 1688 had
reduced political and sectarian affairs to a state of calm equilibrium;
and they desired to cultivate the fruits of serenity by fostering in all
things the spirit of moderation. In poetry, as in life, they tended more
and more to discountenance manifestations of vehemence. Even the poetry
of Dryden, with its reflections of the stormy days through which he had
struggled, seemed to them, though gloriously leading the way toward
perfection, to fall short of equability of temper and smoothness of form.
To work like Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_ (1701) and _Hymn to the
Pillory_ (1703), combative in spirit and free in style, they gave only
guarded and temporary approval.

Inevitably the change of mood entailed losses. Sir Henry Wotton's
_Character of a Happy Life_ (c. 1614) treats the same theme as Pomfret's
_Choice_; but Pomfret's contemporaries were rarely if ever visited by
such gleams as shine in Wotton's lines describing the happy man as one

who never understood
How deepest wounds are given by praise,

and as one

Who God doth late and early pray
More of his grace than gifts to lend.

Such touches of penetrative wisdom and piety, like many other precious
qualities, are of an age that had passed. In the poetry of 1700-1725,
religion forgoes mysticism and exaltation; the intellectual life, daring
and subtlety; the imagination, exuberance and splendor. Enthusiasm for
moral ideals declines into steadfast approval of ethical p