George Herbert was a religious poet of the English Renaissance who provided New England Transcendentalists such as
Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Margaret Fuller with a voice sensitive to nature and open to spiritual experience. His poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits that was favored by the metaphysical school of poets. Emerson quoted Herbert at length in his chapter on “Prospects” in
Nature (1836).