When at length he dared hope that God might have called him to the high office, never man gave himself to its duties with more of whole-heartedness and devotion, and none have proved themselves more clean of the sacrilege of serving at the altar for the sake of the things offered thereon.
He is represented by Dr.Johnson as one of the chief examples of that school of poets called by himself the _metaphysical_, an epithet which, as a definition, is almost false.

True it is that Donne and his followers were always ready to deal with metaphysical subjects, but it was from their mode, and not their subjects, that Dr.Johnson classed them.

What this mode was we shall see presently, for I shall be justified in setting forth its strangeness, even absurdity, by the fact that Dr.Donne was the dear friend of George Herbert, and had much to do with the formation of his poetic habits.

Just twenty years older than Herbert, and the valued and intimate friend of his mother, Donne was in precisely that relation of age and circumstance to influence the other in the highest degree.
The central thought of Dr.Donne is nearly sure to be just: the subordinate thoughts by means of which he unfolds it are often grotesque, and so wildly associated as to remind one of the lawlessness of a dream, wherein mere suggestion without choice or fitness rules the sequence.

As some of the writers of whom I have last spoken would play with words, Dr.
Donne would sport with ideas, and with the visual images or embodiments of them.