It is that same
peculiarity which appears in places and persons and things so different
as Spenser, as the poetry of the Pleiade, as Montaigne, as Raleigh,
as Donne, as the group of singers known as the Caroline poets. It is
a peculiarity which has shown itself in different forms at different
times, but never in such vigour and precision as at this time. It
combines a profound and certainly sincere--almost severe--religiosity
with a very vigorous practice of some things which the religion it
professes does not at all countenance. It has an almost morbidly
pronounced simultaneous sense of the joys and the sorrows of human life,
the enjoyment of the joys being perfectly frank, and the feeling of
the sorrows not in the least sentimental. It unites a great general
refinement of thought, manners, opinion, with an almost astonishing
occasional coarseness of opinion, manners, thought. The prevailing note
in it is a profound melancholy mixed with flashes and intervals of a no
less profound delight. There is in it the sense of death, to a strange
and, at first sight, almost unintelligible extent.
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