the idealism of many poets is become fragmentary, but exact, in place of organic and general. They draw nice distinctions. Yet their view of life is not yet materialised; rather is their sense of the infinite intensified by being rendered more conscious. Instead of merely feeling, they also think; instead of singing, they see with a close observance of the facts which interpose between them and the eternal universe of freedom which they seek. As Alexander Browne wrote:

The glories of your ladies be
But metaphor of things.

All the details of life-even the flower and the sparrow-were become to them symbols of eternity. Behind the most trivial verse of the time lurks this ardent, often mournful, and sometimes ironic mysticism. It is found in their most candid and detached celebrations of the physical, even in such a poem as Carew's Rapture, and in the countless epitaphs or elegies in which they do honour to the dead. As in Sir Thomas Browne's Evening Hymn:

And:

Sleep is death. Oh! make me try
By sleeping what it is to die.
And as gently lay my head

On my grave, as now my bed.

Oh! come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever.

Or again, in Cowley's:

Then down I laid my head,

Down on cold earth, and for a while was dead,
And my freed soul to a strange somewhere fled.

No longer the unquestioning children of life, they were still free from the morbid fear either of sensuous pleasure or of personal extinction, which marks a later decadence.

But love and life and death were to them states to be, as it were, explored and exploited, to be scanned cunningly for confirmation of their own still insatiable greed for vitality.

Grief is a puddle, and reflects not clear
Your beauty's rays,

wrote Carew; and all life was a stream out of the transparency or opacity of which these poets sought to draw significant reflections. Their moods had no longer the simple spontaneity of the Elizabethans; both in the physical and emotional spheres their minds had begun to create subtleties, to criticise and to refine, yet still with a general intuition of the organic note of an universal life, of which their own experiences were the rippling variations.

Amid therefore much conscious eroticism, realism, and artificial conceit, we almost always feel that this ardent pursuit of the infinite in the particular, and the strained metaphors and epithets which from the time of Johnson have been so cursorily condemned in the school of Cowley, the exaggerations which Pope set himself to rectify, are the inevitable result

of an attempt on their part to record precisely infinite experiences, which were also intimately personal. Unfortunately for the interpretation of these particular, individual and ideal emotions, they tried to utilise forms fashioned to convey general, natural and unexamined sentiments. They were baffled by the infinite mystery, which they saw with a kind of critical ecstasy in the smallest details of life, and were unable to find in the words and forms of their time a medium adequate to convey the new particularity of their conception. And so in trying to use realistically and mystically forms which for three centuries in Italy, France and England had served to carry the voice of nature, artifice or sentiment, they were bound to distort them, breaking up their harmony, and expressing through them as often the false fantastic as the true, and only rarely succeeding in expressing a higher, because more consciously human, realisation of life. Their pursuit of the infinite led them to attempt in language the union of the most distant and sundered details, a good man and a telescope, the breast of a woman and a far country possessed by savages, love and physic, as if they wished to prove by an arbitrary reconciliation of opposites the absolute unity of life.

A reaction towards an orderly materialism and a humbler propriety was inevitable.

PURITANISM, then, despite its narrow prejudice, emphasised the reality of the human will. At first, inevitably, its moral egotism seems mean and insignificant after the instinctive amplitude of the preceding age. In every great cycle of art we see an uncritical creative period dwindling into dogma. But in the definition of dogma, however narrow, reason becomes self-conscious and self-respecting; and when the dogma breaks down before a new creative impulse, that impulse is itself more critical and more profoundly rational for the captivity which man has served in the Egypt of hard doctrine and rigid opinions. Thus in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we see a poetry which began in dogma, wit and satire, in an exaggeration of mental conceits,

and of which even the licence had ceased to be natural and had frozen into a fashion, gradually returning to reality, as the mind, apprenticed to dogma, grows more actively and habitually critical, pruning first the excesses of its own conceit and mocking at its own artificial licence. Finally, when passion once again awakes to spurn the tyranny of wit, reason is grown powerful and conscious enough to inform the wider experiences which man is ready to embrace as it never did before, to humanise instinct, and upon a basis of natural impulse to rise to a more distinctively ideal conception of the universe.

This in brief is the process visible in English poetry from the time of Dryden to that of Blake, from Cowley to Shelley.

It may be asserted with some truth that wit is outside the province of idealism; for it deals with the secondary realities of life, with the passing manners, and not the eternal morals of a man, with trivialities rather than essentials. Wit criticises life from outside; it plays lightly over its surface, demanding regularity and flatness, and turning any exaggeration it finds to the uses of satire or drollery. It does not wish to discover truth or realise life, but to enforce order from outside. It is not interested in the primary impulses which function beneath the crust of circumstance, and without a knowledge of which life remains either a frivolous pastime or a disorderly spectacle. And since it accepts life