ABSTRACT
The literary standing of Donne has for a long time been merely that of the leader of the metaphysical poets skilfully analyzed by Johnson in the life of Cowley. The faults of that school, after the lapse of several new eras of taste and criticism, are transparent to the most careless reader of the present day: its virtues need a keen philosophical spirit of sympathy to be felt. The censure of the so-called metaphysical poets, has been too indiscriminate; they were not wholly given up to affectation or conceit; Donne and Cowley were too honest, too poetical by nature, to practice exclusively the forced tricks of art. We must not judge of them by the literary habits of our own times; but, looking at them as foreign authors, so to speak, translate them out of the seventeenth century into the nineteenth.
