part I would almost go to the stake on it) that

the piece is Donne's. In those which are undoubtedly genuine the peculiar quality of Donne flames through and perfumes the dusky air which is his native atmosphere in a way which, though I do not suppose that the French poet had ever heard of Donne, has always seemed to me the true antitype and fulfilment by anticipation of Baudelaire's
" Encensoir oubli^ qui fume En silence k travers la nuit."
Everybody knows the
" Bracelet of bright hair about the bone "
of the late discovered skeleton, identifying the lover : everybody the perfect fancy and phrase of the exordium —
" I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the god of Love was born."
INTRODUCTION. xxix
But similar touches are almost everywhere. The enshrining once for all in the simplest words of a universal thought —
" I wonder by my troth what thou and I Did till we loved ? "
The selection of single adjectives to do the duty of a whole train of surplusage —
" WHiere can we find two better hemispheres Without sharp north, without declining west?" —
meet us, and tell us what we have to expect in all but the earliest. In comparison with these things, such a poem as ' Go and catch a falling star,' delightful as it is, is perhaps only a delightful quaintness, and ' The Indifferent ' only a pleasant quip consummately turned. In these perversities Donne is but playing tours de force. His natural and genuine work re-appears in such poems as ' Canonization,' or as ' The Legacy.' It is the fashion sometimes, and that not always with the worst critics, to dismiss this kind of heroic rapture as an agreeable but conscious exaggeration, partly betrayed and partly condoned by flouting-picces like those just mentioned. The gloss does not do the critic's knowledge of human nature or his honesty in acknowledging his knowledge much credit. Both moods and both expressions are true ; but the rapture is the truer. No one who sees in
XXX INTRODUCTION.
these mere literary or fashionable exercises, can ever appreciate such an aiibade as ' Stay, O Sweet, and do not rise,' or such a midnight piece as ' The Dream,' with its never-to-be-forgotten couplet —
" I must confess, it could not choose but be Profane to think thee anything but thee."
If there is less quintessence in 'The Message,' for all its beauty, it is only because no one can stay long at the point of rapture which character- izes Donne at his most characteristic, and the relaxation is natural — as natural as is the pretty fancy about St. Lucy —
" Who but seven hours herself unmasks" —
the day under her invocation being in the depths of December. But the passionate mood, or that of mystical reflection, soon returns, and in the one Donne shall sing with another of the wondrous phrases where simplicity and perfection
meet —
" So to engraft our hands as yet
Was all our means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation."
Or in the other dwell on the hope of buried lovers —
"To make their souls at the last busy day, Meet at this grave, and make a little stay."
I am not without some apprehension that I
INTRODUCTION. xxxi
shall be judged to have fallen a victim to my own distinction, drawn at the beginning of this paper, and shown myself an unreasonable lover of this astonishing poet. Yet I think I could make good my appeal in any competent critical court. For in Donne's case the yea-nay fashion of censorship which is necessary and desirable in the case of others is quite superfluous. His faults are so gross, so open, so palpable, that they hardly require the usual amount of critical comment and condemnation. But this very peculiarity of theirs constantly obscures his beauties even to not unfit readers. They open him ; they are shocked, or bored, or irritated, or puzzled by his occasional nastiness (for he is now and then simply and inexcusably nasty), his frequent involution and eccentricity, his not quite rare indulgence in extravagances which go near to silliness ; and so they lose the extra- ordinary beauties which lie beyond or among these faults. It is true that, as was said above, there are those, and many of them, who can never and will never like Donne. No one who thinks Don Quixote a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification, no one who thinks it impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had not written the Sonnets, no one who wonders what on earth Giordano Bruno
xxxii INTRODUCTION.
meant by Gli eroici Fut'ori^ need trouble him- self even to attempt to like Donne. "He will TiQwerhave done ^'lih. that attempt," as our Dean himself would have unblushingly obscr\'cd, for he was never weary of punning on his name.
But for those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the ups-and-downs, the ins- and-outs of human temperament, the alterna- tions not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne. They may even be tempted to see in the strangely mixed and flawed character of his style, an index and reflection of the variety and the rapid changes of his thought and feeling. To the praise of the highest poetical art he cannot indeed lay claim- He is of course entitled to the benefit of the pleas that it is uncertain whether he ever prepared definitely for the press a single poetical work of his ; that it is certain that his age regarded his youth with too much disapproval to bestow any critical care on his youthful poems. But it may be retorted that no one with the finest sense of poetry as an art, could have left things so formless as he has left, that it would have been intolerable pain and grief to any such till he had got them, even in MS., into shape. The retort
INTRODUCTION, x«iii
is valid. But if Donne cannot receive the praise due to the accomplished poetical artist, he has that not perhaps higher but certainly rarer, of the inspired poetical creator. No study could have bettered — I hardly know whether any study could have produced — such touches as the best of those which have been quoted, and as many which perforce have been left out And no study could have given him the idiosyncrasy which he has. Nos passions^ says Bossuet, ont que! que chose (Cin/ini. To express infinity no doubt is a contradiction in terms. But no poet has gone nearer to the hinting and adumljra- tion of this infinite quality of passion, and of the relapses and reactions from passion, than the author of 'The Second Anniversary' and ' The Dream,' of * The Rcliquc ' and * The Ecstasy.'
GKOKGE S.MNTSBURy.
XXXV
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
There is no doubt that, during his lifetime, John Donne enjoyed an extraordinary reputation as a poet. Nevertheless it does not appear that, with the exception of the Anatomy of the World, the Elegy on Prince Henry, and two or three sets of commendatory and other verses, any of his poetry was printed before the posthumous quarto of 1633. I am aware that Dr. Grosart has a mare's-nest theory of one or perhaps two, earlier "now-missing privately-printed " collections, but this theory is built on the flimsiest of evidence. Dr. Grosart quotes in support of it —
{a) The entry of "Jhone Done's Lyriques" among the books read by Drummond of Hawthornden in 1613 {Archaeologia Scotica, vol. iv.).
[b) An epigram of Freeman's published in 1614, of which he says, " Freeman in 1614, in his Rubbe and a Great Cast, has an epigram to Donne, in which he celebrates his Storme and Calme, and two 'short' satires." As a matter of fact, the epigram is in Runne and a Great Cast, which is the second part, as Rubbe and a Great Cast is the first, of Freeman's book, and it does not speak of two short Satires, but of Satires which are too short, a very different thing.
Ep. 84.
To John Dunne.
" The Storm described hath set thy name afloat ; Thy Calm a gale of famous wind hath got ; Thy Satires short, too soon we them o'erlook ; 1 prithee, Persius, write a bigger book. "
xxxvi BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
[c) The well-known lines from Ben Jonson's Epignimi {1616), entitled To Lucy ^ Countess of Bedford, with Mr. Donne's Satires, and beginning —
" Lucy, you brightness of our Sphere, who are Life of the Muses' day, their morning Star."
(d) A letter by Donne to his friend George Garrard, dated April 14, 1612, in which, speaking of the Anni- versaries, he says: "Of my Anniversaries, the fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse, which, though it have excuse even in our times, by men who profess and practise much gravity; yet I conless I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself" (Alford, voi. vi. p. 353). Almost precisely similar expressions occur in two other letters written about the same date. One of these has no heading (Alford, vol. vi. p. 338) ; the other is headed "To Sir G. F." (Alford, vol. vi. p. 333).
To my mind the clear implication of these letters is, not that there were "other things printed" of Donne's besides the Anniversaries, but that the Anniversaries were in 1612 the only things he had printed. With regard to Dr. Grosart's three other pieces of evidence, there is nothing to show that they refer to anything but verses circulated in manuscript. It is quite clear that manuscript "books" or collections of Donne's pieces, as distinguished from scattered poems, were in existence. And amongst Donne's letters is one to Sir Robert Karr, written in 1619 (Alford, vol. vi. p. 373), in which he sends him a copy of his poems, togetherwitli " another book,"the Biat/ianatos, which he definitely states had not been and was not to be published. A short MS., probably resembling that which Freeman saw, is to be found in Queen's College, Oxford (MS. 216, f. 198). It contains only the first five Satires, the Storm and Calm, and one lyrical poem, The Curse, there called Dirae.
I come now to a point which Dr. Grosart has alto- gether overlooked. In a letter to Sir Henry Goodyere, written just before Donne took orders, and dated Vigilia St. Thomas, December 20, 1614 (Alford, vol. vi. p. 367), occurs the following passage —
" One thing more I must tell you ; but so softly, that
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE, xxxyR
I am loth to hear myself : and so softly, that if that good lady were in the room, with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is, that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems, and addressing tliem to my Lord Chamberlain. This I mean to do forthwith ; not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. I apprehend some incongruities in tlie resolution ; and 1 know what I shall suffer from many interpretations ; but I am at an end, of much considering that ; and, if I were as startling in that kind, as I ever was, yet in this particular, I am under an unescapable necessity, as I shall let you perceive when I see you. By this occasion 1 am made a rhapsodist of mine own rags, and that cost me more diligence, to seek them, than it did to make them. This made me ask to borrow that old book of you, whicli 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 is it, I am to ask you : whether you ever made any such use of the letter in verse, d nostre conitesse chez vous, as that I may not put it in, amongst the rest to persons of that 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. I pray tell me jis soon as you can, if 1 be at liberty to insert that : for if you have by any occasion applied any pieces to it, 1 see not, tliat it will be discerned, when it ajipears in tht; whole piece. Though this be a little matter, I would be sorry not to have an ac- count of it, within as little after New Year's-tide, as you could."
This letter is, I think, sufficient proof that Donne had not printed his poems before the end of 1614 ; in the absence of any extant copy it is probable that his intention to print them then was never realized. Just such another intention, indeed, he must already have had in 1601, when he wrote the Epistle to his Progress of the Soul. That is evidently intended to follow the portrait-frontis- piece of a printed book. It begins, "Others at the porches and entries of their buildings set their arms ; I, my picture." But it is still more unlikely that he printed them after he had taken orders. As to this we have the evidence both of Ben Jonson and of Walton. Ben Jonson said to Drummond in 1618-19 {Conversations,
VOL. I. ^
xxxviii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
ed. Laing, Shakespeare Society, p. 9), that Donne, "since he was made Doctor, repenteth highly and seeketh to destroy all his poems." Walton perhaps in his Lije (ed. 1640) represents Donne's state of mind more accur- ately. He writes —
"The recreations of his youth were poetry, in which he was so happy as if Nature and all her varieties had been made only to exercise his sharp wit and high fancy ; and in those pieces which were facetiously composed and carelessly scattered — most of them being written before the twentieth year of his age — it may appear by his choice metaphors that both Nature and all the arts joined to assist him with their utmost skill. It is a truth that in his penitential years, viewing some of those pieces that had been loosely — God knows, too loosely — scattered in his youth, he wislied they had been abortive, or so short-lived that his own eyes had witnessed their funerals ; but, though lie was no friend to them, he was not so fallen out with heavenly poetry as to forsake that ; no, not in his declining age, witnessed then by many divine sonnets, and other high, holy and harmonious composures."
But if Donne's poems were not printed, they had at any rate a wide circulation in MSS. among the wits and hterary men of the age. This is evident, firstly, from his letters, many of which accompanied a copy of verses to some friend or patron ; secondly, from the frequent and admiring mention of his contemporaries; and, thirdly, from the commonplace-books of the period, in which he figures very prominently. One result of this popularity appears to have been the ascription to him of a number of poems really by other men. If tlie author of a particular poem was unknown, it came very naturally to the compiler of a commonplace-book to append to it the initials J. D. (See the Appendices to this edition, passim.) There is an apparent allusion to this esoteric reputation, which Donne enjoyed, in Drayton's Epistle to Henry Reynolds, Of Poets and Poesy (published in 1627, but perhaps written earlier). After givin_j a catalogue, which includes nearly all the writers of the day except Donne, Drayton continues —
" For such whose poems, be they ne'er so rare, In private chambers that encloister'd are,
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. xxxix
And by transcription daintily must go, As though the world unworthy were to know Their rich composures, let those men that keep These wondrous relics in their judgment deep. And cry them up so, let such pieces be Spoke of by those that shall come aftei me, I pass not for them."
I am afraid that Drayton was not allowed to have a copy.
The passage from Walton's Life which I have quoted above is of service also in helping to determine the date of Donne's work in the field of poetry. As here too Dr. Grosart has gone wrong, it is worth while to put together some additional testimony of Walton and others on the matter. It all points to the fact that on the whole, al- though they overlap considerably, the secular are earher in date than the sacred poems.
{a) There are the lines by Walton, printed beneath the portrait frontispiece by Marshall to the Poems of 1635. The portrait is dated "Anno D""* 1591, aetatis suae 18."
"This was, for youth, strength, mirth, and wit, that time Most count their golden age ; but 'twas not thine. Thine was thy later years, so much refined From youth's dross, mirth, and wit, as thy pure mind Thought (hke the angels) nothing but the praise Of thy Creator in those last best days. Witness this book, thy Emblem, which begins With Love ; but ends with sighs and tears for sins. '
(b) There is the following passage in Walton's Elegy, written April 7, 1631, first printed together with the Life in the LXXX Sermofts of 1640.
" Did his youth scatter poetry, wherein Lay Love's philosophy ? was every sin Pictured in his sharp satires, made so foul. That some have fear'd sin's shapes, and kept their soul Safer by reading verse ; did he give days. Past marble monuments, to those whose praise He would perpetuate ? Did he — I fear Envy will doubt— these at his twentieth year?
xl BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
But, more matured, did his rich soul conceive And in harmonious holy numbers weave A crown of sacred sonnets, fit to adorn A dying martyr's brow, or to be worn On that blest head of Mary Magdalen, After she wiped Christ's feet, but not till then ; Did he — fit for such penitents as she And he to use — leave us a Litany, Which all devout men love, and doubtless shall, As times grow better, grow more classical ? Did he write hymns, for piety and wit. Equal to those great grave Prudentius writ?"
\c) Drummond of Hawthornden made the following note of a remark of Ben Jonson's to him, in 1618-19 {Conversatio7is, ed. Laing, p. 8) —
" He esteemeth John Done the first poet in the world in
some things : his verses of the Lost Chain he hath by
heart ; and that passage of the Calm, That dust and
feathers doe not stirr, all was so quiet. Affirmeth Done
to have written all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old. "
{d) The evidence of Walton and Jonson is supported by John Chudleigh in his Elegy, printed with the Poems of 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 soar'd out of your sight. Preachers, 'tis you must weep ; the wit he taught You do enjoy ; the Rebels which he brought From ancient discord. Giant faculties, And now no more religious enemies ; Honest to knowing, unto virtuous sweet, Witty to good, and learned to discreet, He reconciled, and bid the usurper go ; Dullness to vice, religion ought to flow ; 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 shew'd us how for sins we ought to sigh, And how to sing Christ's Epithalamy :"
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. xli
Donne was born in 1573, so that if we take Walton's " twentieth year " and Jonson's "twenty-five years" liter- ally, we get 1593 or 1598 as the date before which most of his secular poetry was written. It will be seen, how- ever, from the few poems which I have been able to give a date to in the notes, that no inconsiderable portion even of this division of his work belongs to periods later than 1600. I have not, however, been able to find that any of it, with the exception of one or two Funeral Elegies which can barely be called secular, is subsequent to his ordination in 1615. On the other hand, the ascertained dates of the sacred poetry entirely confirm the statement that this was written during the latter part of his fife, for these range from 1607 to 1631. Considering the whole matter, I have come to the following probable conclusion. The Satires and the Love-Poems {Songs and Sonnets and Elegies) belong to the beginning of his life. But even here, I think, it is possible to detect an earher stratum of cynicism and ethical laxity, and a later stratum marked by intenser and more constant emotions, and by a grow- ing spirituality of thought. I see no reason why we should not date the cliange from the years which separated his first acquaintance with Anne More (1596?) from his marriage with her in 1601. The Divine Poems, as ha3 been said, come last. The Verse Letters, Funeral Elegies and Epithalamia, both in date and in subject-matter, bridge the gulf between the two. Some of the Verse Letters, such as the Stortn and the Calm, belong to the earlier period, but a good many of them, belong to 1610 or thereabouts, and in many ways they show Donne's poetic powers at their ripest.
The first edition of the Poems was entered thus upon the Stationers' Registers ( Arber, vol. iv. ) —
13'' Septembris, 1632. John Marriott. Entered for his copy under the hands of Sir Henry Herbert and both the Wardens, a book of verse and Poems (the five Satires, the first, second, tenth, eleventh and thirteenth Elegies being excepted), and these before excepted to be his, when he brings lawful authority.
vjd.
written by Doctor John Dunn,
xlii BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.
Upon a subsequent date, October 31 of the same year, the allowance of the Satires was noted, but no further mention is made of the excepted Elegies. The book was issued in 1633. It is a small quarto, and has the following title-page —
Poems I By J. D, ] with | Elegies I on the author's death. I London : | Printed by M. F. for John Marriot, ] and are to be sold at his shop in St. Dunstan's | Churchyard in Fleet-Street, 1633.
This is followed by the Printer to the Understanders and the Hexastichon Bibliopolne. The poems are printed without much attempt at arrangement. Eight Elegies, numbered, come together on pages 44, sqq. Four other Elegies appear in other parts of the volume, but I suspect that the five mentioned in the Stationers' Registers entry were five of those added in 1635, and that Marriott did not get authority for them in time for publication in 1633. The Elegies on the author's death at the close of the volume are by Hfenry] K[ing], Thos. Browne, Edw. Hyde, Doctor Cforbet] B[ishop] of 0[xford], Hen. Valentine, Iz, W[alton], M. Tho. Carie [Carew], Sir Lucius Carie, M. Mayne, Arth. Wilson,