DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.50017#0049
INTRODUCTION xliii
the three. There is a fourth picture, the frontispiece
to the fifth edition of the ‘ Pseudodoxia,’ but it is so
unlike the others that I doubt very much if it could
have been Sir Thomas.” 1
Many have discovered a physical likeness to Shake-
speare—some, indeed, to Christ—in Browne’s portraits.
Taine has discerned in his productions a mental like-
ness, a kindred spirit, to Shakespeare, “ who, like
him, applies himself to living things, penetrates their
internal structure, puts himself in communication with
their actual laws . . . discerns behind visible phe-
nomena a world obscure, yet sublime, and trembles
with a kind of veneration, before the vast, indistinct,
but populous abyss, on whose surface our little universe
hangs quivering.” 1
Here I can do no more than allude with gratitude
to Mr. Edmund Gosse’s volume on Browne in the
“ English Men of Letters Series,” one of the many
in which he has illumined English Literature.
The two garden poets of our collection, Abraham
Cowley and Andrew Marvell, were, in spite of their
closeness of age and similarity of education, of very
different poetical complexion. Cowley, the elder by
1 “ Religio Medici”: An Address delivered at Guy’s-
Hospital, 1905. Reprinted from “ The Library,” Jan. 1906.
the three. There is a fourth picture, the frontispiece
to the fifth edition of the ‘ Pseudodoxia,’ but it is so
unlike the others that I doubt very much if it could
have been Sir Thomas.” 1
Many have discovered a physical likeness to Shake-
speare—some, indeed, to Christ—in Browne’s portraits.
Taine has discerned in his productions a mental like-
ness, a kindred spirit, to Shakespeare, “ who, like
him, applies himself to living things, penetrates their
internal structure, puts himself in communication with
their actual laws . . . discerns behind visible phe-
nomena a world obscure, yet sublime, and trembles
with a kind of veneration, before the vast, indistinct,
but populous abyss, on whose surface our little universe
hangs quivering.” 1
Here I can do no more than allude with gratitude
to Mr. Edmund Gosse’s volume on Browne in the
“ English Men of Letters Series,” one of the many
in which he has illumined English Literature.
The two garden poets of our collection, Abraham
Cowley and Andrew Marvell, were, in spite of their
closeness of age and similarity of education, of very
different poetical complexion. Cowley, the elder by
1 “ Religio Medici”: An Address delivered at Guy’s-
Hospital, 1905. Reprinted from “ The Library,” Jan. 1906.