thing of a commonplace in reference to that Renaissance of which, as it
slowly passed from south to north, Donne was one of the latest and yet
one of the most perfect exponents. The strange story which Brantôme
tells of Margaret of Navarre summoning a lover to the church under
whose flags his mistress lay buried, and talking with him of her, shows,
a generation before Donne's birth, the influence which in his day had
made its way across the narrow seas as it had earlier across the Alps, and
had at each crossing gathered gloom and force if it had lost lightness and
color. Always in him are the two conflicting forces of intense enjoyment
of the present, and intense feeling of the contrast of that present with the
future. He has at once the transcendentalism which saves sensuality and
the passion which saves mysticism. Indeed the two currents run so full and
strong in him, they clash and churn their waves so boisterously, that this
is of itself sufficient to account for the obscurity, the extravagance, the
undue quaintness which have been charged against him. He was "of
the first order of poets"; but he was not of the first among the first. Only
Dante perhaps among these greatest of all had such a conflict and ebulli-
tion of feeling to express. For, as far as we can judge, in Shakespeare, even
in the Sonnets, the poetical power mastered to some extent at the very
first the rough material of the poetic instinct, and prepared before ex-
pression the things to be expressed. In Dante we can trace something of
the presence of slag and dross in the ore; and even in Dante we can
perhaps trace faintly also the difficulty of smelting it. Donne, being a
lesser poet than Dante, shows it everywhere. It is seldom that even for a
few lines, seldomer that for a few stanzas, the power of the furnace is
equal to the volumes of ore and fuel that are thrust into it. But the
fire is always there--overtasked, overmastered for a time, but never
choked or extinguished; and ever and anon from gaps in the smoulder-
ing mass there breaks forth such a sudden flow of pure molten metal, such
a flower of incandescence, as not even in the very greatest poets of all
can be ever surpassed or often rivalled.

For critical, and indeed for general purposes, the poetical works of
Donne may be divided into three parts, separated from each other by a
considerable difference of character and, in one case at least, of time.
These are the Satires, which are beyond all doubt very early; the Elegies
and other amatory poems, most of which are certainly, and all probably,
early likewise; and the Divine and Miscellaneous Poems, some of which
may not be late, but most of which certainly are. All three divisions have
certain characteristics in common; but the best of these characteristics,
and some which are not common to the three, belong to the second and
third only.

It was the opinion of the late seventeenth and of the whole of the
eighteenth century that Donne, though a clever man, had no ear.
Chalmers, a very industrious student, and not such a bad critic, says so
in so many words; Johnson undoubtedly thought so; Pope demonstrated

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