in the process. The style, again, is essentially logical, perfectly clear, and thoroughly articulate even in the longest sentences, now that he has not to force his words into metrical fetters. It is thoroughly alive; never flagging, relaxed, or clumsy, however elaborate. He is specially master of one device. He reaches a climax, as you suppose, and that only leads to another more surprising, and so to a third, which eclipses its predecessors. Or sometimes a sentence contains an accumulation of apparent synonyms, intended to make the idea flash new sparkles from different facets. Donne, at least, never goes to sleep, and the alertness and versatility indicated is constantly surprising.
This, of course, involves the string of quibbles and conceits which would strike a modern congregation sometimes as puerile and sometimes as profane. He can take suggestions from all manner of topics. He can at times appeal to mathematical analogies. He has been amused by the remark that you have only to join the ends of a flat map to make east coincide with west, and more than once uses it for edification. The natural history of those days, whose animals seem to come partly out of folk-lore and partly from
