This poem is a somewhat strange medley, with a confusion of figure, and a
repeated failure in dignity, which is very far indeed from being worthy
of Raleigh's prose. But it is very remarkable how wretchedly some men
will show, who, doing their own work well, attempt that for which
practice has not--to use a word of the time--_enabled_ them. There is
real power in the poem, however, and the confusion is far more indicative
of the pleased success of an unaccustomed hand than of incapacity for
harmonious work. Some of the imagery, especially the "crystal buckets,"
will suggest those grotesque drawings called _Emblems_, which were much
in use before and after this period, and, indeed, were only a putting
into visible shape of such metaphors and similes as some of the most
popular poets of the time, especially Doctor Donne, indulged in; while
the profusion of earthly riches attributed to the heavenly paths and the
places of repose on the journey, may well recall Raleigh's own
descriptions of South American glories. Englishmen of that era believed
in an earthly Paradise beyond the Atlantic, the wonderful reports of
whose magnificence had no doubt a share in lifting the imaginations and
hopes of the people to the height at which they now stood.

There may be an appearance of irreverence in the way in which he
contrasts the bribeless Hall of Heaven with the proceedings at his own
trial, where he was browbeaten, abused, and, from the very commencement,
treated as a guilty man by Sir Edward Coke, the king's attorney. He even
puns with the words _angels_ and _fees_. Burning from a sense of
injustice, however, and with the solemnity of death before him, he could
not be guilty of _conscious_ irreverence, at least. But there is another
remark I have to make with regard to the matter, which will bear upon
much of the literature of the time: even the great writers of that period
had such a delight in words, and such a command over them, that like