These were mostly of the middle class, physicians, lawyers, and such men of letters as could subsist on the scant wants of an unliterary town.
"The Valley of Decision"
Edith Wharton
Then shall my ghost not walk about; but keep Still in the cool and silent shades of sleep;" or when he writes that astonishing verse, so unlike his usual style- "In this world, the Isle of Dreams, While we sit by sorrow's streams, Tears and terrors are our themes;" when Carew, in one of those miraculous closing bursts, carefully led up to, of which he has almost the secret, cries "Oh, love me then, and now begin it, Let us not lose this present minute; For time and age will work that wrack Which time nor age shall ne'er call back;" when even the sober blood in Habington's decent veins spurts in this splendid sally- "So, 'mid the ice of the far northern sea, A star about the Arctic circle may Than ours yield clearer light; yet that but shall Serve at the frozen pilot's funeral:" when Crashaw writes as if caught by the very fire of which he speaks,-the fire of the flaming heart of Saint Theresa; when Lovelace, most careless and unliterary of all men, breaks out as if by simple instinct into those perfect verses which hardly even Burns and Shelley have equalled since,-it is impossible for any one who feels for poetry at all not to feel more than appreciation, not to feel sheer enthusiasm.
"A History of English Literature Elizabethan Literature"
George Saintsbury
Even in the serious and perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace conceptions of it.
"Their Silver Wedding Journey"
William Dean Howells
