Openly love's force; nor in bed fright thy nurse I would not have the heart of one who could read these lines, and think only of their rugged style, and faults of taste and expression. The superior power of truth and sentiment have immortalized this little poem, and the occasion which gave it birth. The wife and husband parted, and he left with her another little poem, which he calls a "Valediction, forbidding to mourn.” When Donne was at Paris, and still suffering under the grief of this separation, he saw, or fancied he saw, the apparition of his wife pass through the room in which he sat, her hair dishevelled and hanging down upon her shoulders, her face pale and mournful, and carrying in her arms a dead infant. Sir Robert Drury found him a few minutes afterwards in such a state of horror, and his mind so impressed with the reality of this vision, that an express was immediately sent off to England, to inquire after the health of Mrs. Donne. She had been seized, after the departure of her husband, with a premature confinement; had been at the point of death; but was then out of danger, and recovering. This incident has been related by all Donne's biographers, by some with infinite solemnity, by others with sneering incredulity. I can speak from experience, of the power of the imagination to impress us with a palpable sense of what is not, and cannot be; and it seems to me that, in a man of Donne's ardent, melancholy temperament, brood. ing day and night on the one sad idea, a high state of nervous excitement is sufficient to account for this impression, without having recourse to supernatural agency, or absolute disbelief. Donne, after several years of study, was prevailed on to enter holy orders; and about four years afterwards, his amiable wife died in her twelfth confinement.* His grief was so overwhelming, that his old friend Walton thinks it necessary thus to apologize for him: "Nor is it hard to think (being that passions may be both changed and heightened by accidents,) but that the abundant affection which was once betwixt him and her, who had so long been the delight of his eyes and the companion of his youth; her, with whom he had divided so many pleasant sorrows and contented fears, as common people are not capable of, should be changed into a commensurable grief.” He roused himself at length to his duties; and preaching his first sermon at St. Clement's Church, in the Strand, where his beloved wife lay buried, he took for his text, Jer. iii. v. 1: "Lo! I am the man that hath seen affliction ;" and sent all his congregation home in tears. *In 1617. * Among Donne's earlier poetry may be distinguished the following little song, which has so much more harmony and elegance than his other pieces, that it is scarcely a fair specimen of his style. It was long popular, and I can remember, when a child, hearing it sung to very beautiful music. Send home my long stray'd eyes to me, And false passions, Made by thee Fit for no good sight-keep them still! Send home my harmless heart again, Of protestings, Its word and troth, Keep it still-'tis none of mine! Perhaps it may interest some readers to add, that Donne's famous lines, which have been quoted ad infinitum, The pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, were not written on his wife, but on Elizabeth Drury, the only daughter of his patron and friend, Sir Robert Drury. She was the richest heiress in England, the wealth of her father being considered almost incalculable; and this, added to her singular beauty, and extraordinary talents and acquirements, rendered her so popularly interesting, that she was considered a fit match for Henry, Prince of Wales. She died in her sixteenth year. Dr. Donne and his wife were maternal ancestors of the poet Cowper. CHAPTER XXVII. CONJUGAL POETRY, CONTINUED. HABINGTON'S CASTARA. ONE of the most elegant monuments ever raised by genius to conjugal affection, was Habington's Castara. William Habington, who ranks among the most graceful of our old minor poets, was a gentleman of an ancient Roman Catholic family in Worcestershire, and born in 1605.* On his return from his It was the mother of William Habington who addressed to her brother, Lord Mounteagle, that extraordinary letter which led to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot.-Nash's History of Worcestershire. travels, he saw and loved Lucy Herbert, the daughter of Lord Powis, and granddaughter of the Earl of Northumberland. She was far his superior in birth, being descended, on both sides, from the noblest blood in England; and her haughty relations at first opposed their union. It was, however, merely that degree of opposition, without which the 66 course of true love would have run too smooth." It was just sufficient to pique the ardor of the lover, and prove the worth and constar.cy of her he loved. The history of their attachment has none of the painful interest which hangs round that of Donne and his wife: it is a picture of pure and peaceful happiness, and of mutual tenderness, on which the imagination dwells with a soft complacency and unalloyed pleasure; with nothing of romance but what was borrowed from the elegant mind and playful fancy, which heightened and embellished the delightful reality. If Habington had not been born a poet, a tombstone in an obscure country church would have been the only memorial of himself and his Castara. "She it was who animated his imagination with tenderness and elegance, and filled it with images of beauty, purified by her feminine delicacy from all grosser alloy." In return, he may be allowed to exult in the immortality he has given her. Thy vows are heard! and thy Castara's name By poets up to heaven-each there a star. |