The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

But as fuller example of this school at its very best may be given this citation from Marvel's lines To his Coy Mistress:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Should'st rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews;
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.
For lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

But Marvel is in no way typical of the great body of the Puritans. He stands, as Milton does,

for the cultured section among them; but their preoccupations were religious rather than political, and Marvel, whose best known works in his own day were satires (now hard to read), did not write of religion. Milton wrote of religion, but from a standpoint of his own, and the poet of Paradise Regained attended no place of worship. The true expression of Puritan England is to be found in the writings of John Bunyan, tinker and Baptist preacher, who knew no books but the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs.

John Bunyan was born at Elstow near Bedford in 1628, was bred in the Church of England, and carried a musket in the Civil War, probably on the Royalist side. It was an age of very literal belief in heaven and in hell, and Bunyan possessed a vivid imagination, which wrought upon him with torments. During his boyhood, and for years after, he went through agonies of religious doubt; not doubting the truth of revealed religion, but doubting whether he possessed the faith to win salvation. His life appears to have been exemplary, but his mind forged temptations for itself, and for a while Bunyan believed that he had renounced Christ and committed the unpardonable sin. At last he recovered assurance of grace and peace of mind. Joining the Baptists, he soon showed a great gift of speech, and the Restoration found him a preacher famous through the Midlands. Legislation against nonconformity followed, and Bunyan was prosecuted. He was treated with all possible leniency; but, since he would give no pledge to refrain from unlicensed preaching, and when discharged was again taken, he remained in jail for twelve years, till the Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. In jail (but in no rigorous confinement) he wrote his spiritual

K

autobiography Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners; there he wrote also his allegorical story The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, and his more ambitious allegory The Holy War, which relates the "Siege of the City of Man Soul." And there, above all, he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress.

"The Pilgrim's Progress," says Mr. Froude, "is the history of the struggle of human nature to overcome temptation and shake off the bondage of sin, under the convictions which prevailed among serious men in England in the seventeenth century. The allegory is the life of its author cast in an imaginative form. Every step in Christian's journey had been first trodden by Bunyan himself." The story of its composition is told in the prefatory

verses:

When at the first I took my Pen in hand
Thus for to write; I did not understand
That I at all should make a little Book
In such a mode; Nay, I had undertook
To make another, which were almost done,
Before I was aware I this begun.

And thus it was: I writing of the Way
And Race of Saints, in this our Gospel-day,
Fell suddenly into an Allegory

About their journey, and the way to Glory,
In more than twenty things which I set down:
This done, I twenty more had in my Crown,
And they again began to multiply,

Like sparks that from the coals of fire do fly.
Nay then, thought I, if that you breed so fast,
I'll put you by yourselves, lest you at last
Should prove ad infinitum, and eat out
The Book that I already am about.
Well, so I did; but yet I did not think
To shew to all the World my Pen and Ink
In such a mode; I only thought to make
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my Neighbour; no not I,
I did it mine own self to gratifie.

It was, in short, a genuine work of art, conceived and executed with the true artist's pleasure; and in this spontaneity and absence of intention lies its peculiar charm. The man Christian, who, at the bidding of a preacher called Evangelist, sets out on a journey, leaving home and friends, and weighted with a heavy burden, has adventures on the road which Bunyan describes with the artist's glee. His fight, lasting a day long, in the Valley of Humiliation with the fiend Apollyon has far more reality than all the combats of knights in Spenser. Bunyan narrates it as if he had seen it. And it is not only this extraordinary quality of life and freshness that makes the parable a story which all ages can read with delight, but also there is a recurring subtlety of insight which illuminates strange corners of the human heart. Take, for instance, this from the passage telling how Christian passed by hell's mouth in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, much beset with fiends:

One thing I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I perceived it: Just when he was come over against the mouth of the burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stept up softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind. This put Christian more to it than anything that he met with before, even to think that he should now blaspheme him that he loved so much before; yet, if he could have helped it he would not have done it; but he had not the discretion to stop his ears, nor to know from whence those blasphemies came.

It is another part of Bunyan's artistry - for had Bunyan not been an artist as well as a saint his Pilgrim's Progress would have joined the legions of pious and defunct volumes that his embodied qualities are more real and human than the per

sonages of most plays and novels. Here is Mr. Byends, whose principles in his own view were "harmless and profitable," and who came from the town of Fair Speech, where he was highly connected. But Christian and Faithful shook him off, and other company coming up, Mr. By-ends was ready to explain to the newcomers who were these upon the Road before them:

By-ends. They are a couple of far-countrymen, that after their mode are going on Pilgrimage.

Money-love. Alas! Why did they not stay, that we might have had their good company? for they, and we, and you, Sir, I hope, are all going on a Pilgrimage.

By-ends. We are so indeed; but the men before us are so rigid, and love so much their own notions, and do also so lightly esteem the opinions of others, that let a man be never so godly, yet if he jumps not with them in all things, they thrust him quite out of their company.

Save-all. That's bad; but we read of some that are righteous overmuch; and such men's rigidness prevails with them to judge and condemn all but themselves. But I pray, what, and how many, were the things wherein you differed?

By-ends. Why, they, after their headstrong manner, conclude that it is duty to rush on their Journey all weathers, and I am for waiting for Wind and Tide. They are for hazarding all for God at a clap, and I am for taking all advantages to secure my Life and Estate. They are for holding their notions, though all other men are against them; but I am for Religion in what, and so far as, the times and my safety will bear it.

Rightly famous is the beauty of the passage which describes how Christian, with his new companion Hopeful (who replaces the martyred Faithful), having crossed the River, approaches the City of his desire, and is greeted by the King's Trumpeters:

Thus therefore they walked on together; and as they walked, ever and anon these Trumpeters, even with joyful sound, would, by mixing their music with looks and gestures, still signify to Christian and his Brother, how welcome they were into their company, and with what gladness they came