and all literary standards to the winds; and precisely for this reason he is forgotten, though his great intellect and his genius had marked him as one of those who should do things “worthy to be remembered.”  While the tendency of literature is to exalt style at the expense of thought, the world has many men and women who exalt feeling and thought above expression; and to these Donne is good reading.  Browning is of the same school, and compels attention.  While Donne played havoc with Elizabethan style, he nevertheless influenced our literature in the way of boldness and originality; and the present tendency is to give him a larger place, nearer to the few great poets, than he has occupied since Ben Jonson declared that he was “the first poet of the world in some things,” but likely to perish “for not being understood.”  For to much of his poetry we must apply his own satiric verses on another’s crudities: 

    Infinite work! which doth so far extend
    That none can study it to any end.

GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633)

“O day most calm, most bright,” sang George Herbert, and we may safely take that single line as expressive of the whole spirit of his writings.  Professor Palmer, whose scholarly edition of this poet’s works is a model for critics and editors, calls Herbert the first in English poetry who spoke face to face with God.  That may be true; but it is interesting to note that not a poet of the first half of the seventeenth century, not even the gayest of the Cavaliers, but has written some noble verse of prayer or aspiration, which expresses the underlying Puritan spirit of his age.  Herbert is the greatest, the most consistent of them all.  In all the others the Puritan struggles against the Cavalier, or the Cavalier breaks loose from the restraining Puritan; but in Herbert the struggle is past and peace has come.  That his life was not all calm, that the Puritan in him had struggled desperately before it subdued the pride and idleness of the Cavalier, is evident to one who reads between his lines: 

I struck the board and cry’d, No more! 
I will abroad. 
What?  Shall I ever sigh and pine? 
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind.

There speaks the Cavalier of the university and the court; and as one reads to the end of the little poem, which he calls by the suggestive name of “The Collar,” he may know that he is reading condensed biography.

Those who seek for faults, for strained imagery and fantastic verse forms in Herbert’s poetry, will find them in abundance; but it will better repay the reader to look for the deep thought and fine feeling that are hidden in these wonderful religious lyrics, even in those that appear most artificial.  The fact that Herbert’s reputation was greater, at times, than Milton’s, and that his poems when published after his death had a large sale and influence, shows certainly that he appealed to the men of his age; and his poems will probably be read and appreciated, if only by the few, just so long as men are strong enough to understand the Puritan’s spiritual convictions.