ABSTRACT
Consider the case of Donne. His best poems abound in meat and marrow. He had a temper as remarkable for emotional intensity as for intellectual subtlety. Until disease-perhaps the Nemesis of his torrid youth-had wasted his body he seems to have been in a very high degree what Tennyson said that John Richard Green was-‘a vivid man’. His thick, choked utterance cannot disguise the force and ardency of his nature. At their smokiest and sootiest his suffocated fires crackle and explode into sudden surprising flame. But scarcely anything had the luck to come shapen right out of that forge. His uncouthness really passes toleration, and, with a strange irony, has condemned this man, so ‘vivid’ in his life, to the driest and dustiest kind of embalmment-he is read by the literary student only! Professor Grierson, who not long ago rendered Donne the invaluable service of editing his poems with an enthusiasm only equalled by his erudition and acumen, has explored every nook of his poet’s rugged and volcanic landscape, and has applied to some of its tangled thickets an ingenious system of metrical guide-posts, so that the wayfaring man, though a fool, shall not err there. They enable us to wrestle more successfully with a versification which in its supreme crabbedness must be the envy of one or two living practitioners; but even with those amenities of travel the region will never attract any but the hardier kind of tourist.
