Among the “metaphysical poets” of the seventeenth century Richard Crashaw, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan form a group apart. They were writers of purely devotional poetry in an age when licentious love-poems and “epithalamiums”— what Dr. Johnson styled “amorous ditties”—were the prevailing fashion. They were united by the . immense spiritual debt which, as they both acknowledge, Crashaw and Vaughan owed to “holy Herbert.” And their chief poems were written within the space of twenty years, for Herbert wrote “The Temple” in 1632 ; Crashaw, “Steps to the Temple” in 1648 ; and Vaughan, “Silex Scintillans” in 1654.

Johnson’s use of the word “metaphysical” in his Essay on Cowley is a curious instance of how a quite inappropriate epithet may fairly describe a certain peculiarity of poetic style. For, although it has no relation whatever to any philosophical matter in the poetry, it is by no means difficult to see what was in the great critic’s mind. An appearance of profundity of thought produced by cryptic language was what he noted, and he used the word “metaphysical” in much the same way as some modern writers use the word “mystical,” without regard to its exact connotation, as a general term for that which is not easily understood because its meaning does not lie upon the surface. Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan were thus, to a certain extent, “metaphysical” poets, like Cowley and Donne. Herbert, indeed, explains, and partly justifies, his use of this form in the poem strangely entitled “Jordan”