Though she were true when you met her,
And last till you write your letter,

Yet she

Will be

False, ere I come, to two or three.1

But

This is the spirit of Ariosto's story of Giocondo. Donne goes further, and cynically erects this observed habit of fickleness into a rule for constant, but discriminating, change:

By Nature, which gave it, this liberty

Thou lovest, but O! canst thou love it and me?
Likeness glues love; and if that thou so do,
To make us like and love, must I change too?
More than thy hate I hate it; rather let me
Allow her change, then change as oft as she;
And so not teach, but force, my opinion
To love not any one, nor every one.
To live in one land is captivity,

To run all countries a wild roguery.

Waters stink soon, if in one place they bide,
And in that vast sea are more putrified ;
But when they kiss one bank, and leaving this
Never look back, but the next bank do kiss,
There are they purest; change is the nursery
Of music, joy, life, and eternity.2

From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was perhaps reclaimed by genuine love. To his wife he seems to have been devotedly attached, and in the poems written after his marriage in 1601 we find a complete change of sentiment and style. The old underlying conviction of the indestructible nature of the soul and of the corruption of the material world remains, but it is now made the starting-point for a graver philosophy of conduct. The Verse Letters written to the Countesses of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Salisbury, though all are couched in a vein of metaphysical compliment, are decorous in tone; in The Anatomy of the World Donne seems to have intended to embody his serious thoughts about the meaning and duties of human life. Whether there was any real ground for the 2 Elegy iii.

1 Song, "Go and catch a falling star."

hyperbolical praise with which he exalts the memory of Elizabeth Drury, we have no means of knowing. It is said, indeed, that she was betrothed to Henry, Prince of Wales; but Ben Jonson probably expressed a general opinion when he said to Drummond that "Done's 'Anniversarie' was profane and full of blasphemies that he told Mr. Done, if it had been written of the Virgin Marie it had been something; to which he answered that it described the Idea of a Woman, and not as she was."

Viewed literally, The Anatomy of the World fully deserves the sentence passed upon it by Jonson. The poet asserts that after the death of Elizabeth Drury the whole mortal universe lost its vitality; that nothing but the shadow of life remained in it; that the disorder in the constitution of things, the decay and weakness of mankind, and the failure of the influence of the heavenly bodies, are all due to her removal from the earthly sphere. It is no wonder that such absurdities should have provoked matter-of-fact criticism. They are, however, not of the essence of the composition. "I hear from England," writes Donne in Paris to a correspondent with the initials Sir G. F., "of many censures of my book of Mrs. Drury; if any of these censures do but pardon me my descent in printing anything in verse (which if they do they are more charitable than myself; for I do not pardon myself, but confess that I did it against my conscience, that is against my own opinion, that I should not have done so), I doubt not that they will soon give over that other part of the indictment, which is that I have said so much; for nobody can imagine that I, who never saw her, could have purpose in that, than that when I had received so very good testimony of her worthiness, and was gone down to print verses, it became me to say, not what I was sure was just truth, but the best that I could conceive; for that would have been a new weakness in me to have praised anybody in printed verse, that had not been capable of the best verse that I could give."

The true character of The Anatomy of the World is indicated in the respective titles of the two "Anniversaries."

That of the first runs : Wherein, by occasion of the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole world is represented." The subject of the second is defined thus: "Wherein, by occasion of the religious death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the incommodities of the soul in this life, and her exaltation in the next, are contemplated." In other words, the early death and religious character of Elizabeth Drury are merely the text justifying an elaborate exposition of Donne's philosophy of life. The girl stood to Donne, for his poetical purpose, in the same relation as Beatrice stood to Dante in the Vita Nuova and the Divine Comedy, being the incarnate symbol of the spiritual perfection-the Idea of Woman, as he put it to Ben Jonson -which he sought to express. When he says that her death was the cause of all the imperfections of the material world, he intended, in the first place, to pay a hyperbolical compliment to the daughter of his patron, and in the second, to express the theological doctrine of the corruption of Nature after the fall of man from his original state of perfection.

On the whole, it seems to me probable that the publication of The Anatomy of the World was part of a deliberate literary design on Donne's part. His affected depreciation of verse-writing is not to be taken seriously. His views of life were changing with his years: he was anxious for either secular or sacred employment: he regretted the evidences of a dissipated past which existed in his youthful poems: he hoped to attain the object of his ambition by giving public proof of the present gravity of his mind, and by securing the special favour of the most influential patrons of literature, such as the famous ladies of the Court, to whom so many of his Verse Letters are addressed. He writes to a correspondent in 1614 "This made me ask to borrow that old book" (i.e. an MS. collection of his poems), "which it will be too late to see, for that use, when I see you: for I must do this as a valediction to the world before I take orders. But this it is I am to ask of you whether you ever made

:

any such use of the letter in verse à nostre comtesse chez vous, as that I may put it in among the rest to persons of rank; for I desire it very much that something should bear her name in the book, and I would be just to my written words to my Lord Harrington, to write nothing after that." To Lady Bedford herself he writes, in a Verse Letter, perhaps the one above referred to :

So whether my hymns you admit or choose,

In me you've hallowèd a pagan muse,

And denizened a stranger who, mistaught

By blamers of the times they've marred, hath sought
Virtues in corners, which now bravely do

Shine in the world's best part, or all it,--you.

As to the poems being a "valediction to the world," Donne kept his promise. His letter to Sir H. Goodyere was written within a year of his taking orders, and henceforth all his publications in prose and verse were of a religious and theological cast. The last period of his poetical genius contains the Divine Poems, comprising meditations on the various mysteries of the Christian faith, a version of Tremellius' Lamentations of Jeremiah, written after the death of his much-loved wife, and other religious topics. As John Chudleigh, one of his panegyrists, said in the edition of his poems published after his death in 1650:

Long since this task of tears from you was due,
Long since, O poets, he did die to you,

Or left you dead, when wit and he took flight
On divine wings, and soared out of your sight.

In close friendship with George Herbert and other divines of the period, he helped during the remainder of his life to swell the volume of Anglican ascetic thought which, under the direction of Laud, formed, in the reign of Charles I., the counterbalancing force to the movement of iconoclastic Puritanism.

But though his view of life and his object in art were thus completely altered, his poetical method remained consistently the same. As his admirer, Chudleigh, again remarks::

He kept his loves, but not his objects: Wit
He did not banish, but transplanted it;

Taught it his place and use, and brought it home
To piety which it doth best become;

He showed us how for sins we ought to sigh,

And how to sing Christ's epithalamy.

How just this criticism is may be seen from Donne's Hymns to Christ at the Author's last going into Germany:—

Nor Thou, nor Thy religion, dost control

The amorousness of an harmonious soul;

But Thou wouldst have that love Thyself; as Thou

Art jealous, Lord, so am I jealous now;

Thou lovest not, till from loving more Thou free
My soul; whoever gives takes liberty;

Oh, if Thou carest not whom I love,
Alas! Thou lovest not me.

Seal then this bill of my divorce to all

On whom those fainter beams of love did fall;
Marry those loves, which in youth scattered be
On fame, wit, hopes-false mistresses-to Thee.
Churches are best for prayer that have least light;
To see God only I go out of sight;

And to escape stormy days, I choose
An everlasting night.

Here we have precisely the same kind of paradoxical logic, the same subtlety of thought and imagery, as we find in the Elegy on Change, and though the imagination is now fixed on an unchangeable object, it plays round it precisely in the same way. The essence of Donne's wit is abstraction. Whether he is writing on the theme of sacred or profane love, his method lies in separating the perceptions of the soul from the entanglements of sense, and after isolating a thought, a passion, or a quality, in the world of pure ideas, to make it visible to the fancy by means of metaphorical images and scholastic allusions. The most characteristic specimens of his wit are to be found in his Songs and Sonnets, where he is dealing with the metaphysics of love, for here his imagination is at liberty to move whithersoever it chooses; and the extraordinary ingenuity with which he masters and reduces to epigrammatic form the most minute distinctions of