And yet it is a kind of inward feast; A harmony that sounds within the breast; An odour, light, embrace, in which the soul doth rest. XIII. A heavenly feast no hunger can consume; Ingraced into so high a favour, there The saints, with their beau-peers, whole worlds outwear; And things unseen do see, and things unheard do hear. XIV. Ye blessed souls, grown richer by your spoil, XV. Had I a voice of steel to tune my song: Were every verse as smooth as smoothest glass; Should it presume to adorn (were misadvised) XVI. Most happy prince, whose eyes those stars behold, That overflowing skill, wherewith of old Thou wont'st to smooth rough speech; now mayst thou shower Fresh streams of praise upon that holy bower, Which well we heaven call, not that it rolls, But that it is the heaven of our souls: Most happy prince, whose sight so heavenly sight beholds! XVII. Ah, foolish shepherds! who were wont to esteem He washed his flocks in Jordan's spotless tide; XVIII. But now such lively colours did embeam. XIX. Fairest of fairs, that at his eyes doth dress Her glorious face; those eyes, from whence are shed His love, high God all heaven as captive leads, And in those windows doth his arms englaze, And on those eyes, the angels all do gaze, And from those eyes, the lights of heaven obtain their blaze. XX. But let the Kentish lad,* that lately taught Of choicest praise; and hung her heavenly bowers XXI. Let his shrill trumpet, with her silver blast, XXII. Impotent words, weak lines, that strive in vain; Infinite sure those joys; my words but light; Light is the palace where she dwells; oh, then, how bright! *The author of 'The Purple Island.' JOHN DONNE. JOHN DONNE was born in London, in the year 1573. He sprang from a Catholic family, and his mother was related to Sir Thomas More and to Heywood the epigrammatist. He was very early distinguished as a prodigy of boyish acquirement, and was entered, when only eleven, of Harthall, now Hertford College. He was designed for the law, but relinquished the study when he reached nineteen. About the same time, having studied the controversies between the Papists and Protestants, he deliberately went over to the latter. He next accompanied the Earl of Essex to Cadiz, and looked wistfully over the gulf dividing him from Jerusalem, with all its holy memories, to which his heart had been translated from very boyhood. He even meditated a journey to the Holy Land, but was discouraged by reports as to the dangers of the way. On his return he was received by the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere into his own house as his secretary. Here he fell in love with Miss More, the daughter of Sir George More, Lord-Lieutenant of the Tower, and the niece of the Chancellor. His passion was returned, and the pair were imprudent enough to marry privately. When the matter became known, the father-in-law became infuriated. He prevailed on Lord Ellesmere to drive Donne out of his service, and had him even for a short time imprisoned. Even when released he continued in a pitiable plight, and but for the kindness of Sir Francis Wooley, a son of Lady Ellesmere by a former marriage, who received the young couple into his family and entertained them for years, they would have perished. When Donne reached the age of thirty-four, Dr Merton, afterwards Bishop of Durham, urged him to take orders, and offered him a benefice, which he was generously to relinquish in his favour. Donne declined, on account, he said, of some past errors of life, which, though repented of and pardoned by God, might not be forgotten by men, and might cast dishonour on the sacred office.' When Sir F. Wooley died, Sir Robert Drury became his next protector. Donne attended him on an embassy to France, and his wife formed the romantic purpose of accompanying her hus band in the disguise of a page. Here was a wife fit for a poet! In order to restrain her from her purpose, he had to address to her some verses, commencing, 'By our strange and fatal interview.' Isaak Walton relates how the poet, one evening, as he sat alone in Paris, saw his wife appearing to him in vision, with a dead infant in her arms-a proof at once of the strength of his love and of his imagination. This beloved and admirable woman died in 1617, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, and Donne's grief approached distraction. When he had reached the forty-second year of his age, our poet, at the instance of King James, became a clergyman, and was successively appointed Chaplain to the King, Lecturer to Lincoln's Inn, Dean of St Dunstan's in the West, and Dean of St Paul's. In the pulpit he attracted great attention, particularly from the more thoughtful and intelligent of his auditors. He continued Dean of St Paul's till his death, which took place in 1631, when he was approaching sixty. He died of consump tion, a disease which seldom cuts down a man so near his grand climacteric. 'He was buried,' says Campbell, 'in St Paul's, where his figure yet remains in the vault of St Faith's, carved from a painting, for which he sat a few days' (it should be weeks) before his death, dressed in his winding-sheet.' He kept this portrait constantly by his bedside to remind him of his mortality. Donne's Sermons fill a large folio, with which we were familiar in boyhood, but have not seen since. De Quincey says, alluding partly to them, and partly to his poetry,- Few writers have shown a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne, for he combined-what no other man has ever donethe last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the 'Metempsychosis,'-thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Eschylus; while a diamond-dust of rhetorical brilliances is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and |