s sufficient for me that in one special point of the
poetic charm--the faculty of suddenly transfiguring common things by a
flood of light, and opening up strange visions to the capable
imagination--Donne is surpassed by no poet of any language, and equalled by
few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all
probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the
fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost
perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which
came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently
licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he alternates the highest
poetry with the lowest doggerel, the noblest thought with the most trivial
crotchet--all this is true, and all this must be allowed for; but it only
chequers, it does not obliterate, the record of his poetic gifts and
graces. He is, moreover, one of the most historically important of poets,
although by a strange chance there is no known edition of his poems earlier
than 1633, some partial and privately printed issues having disappeared
wholly if they ever existed. His influence was second to the influence of
no poet of his generation, and completely overshadowed all others, towards
his own latter days and the decades immediately following his death, except
that of Jonson. Thomas Carew's famous description of him as

"A king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit,"

expresses the general opinion of the time; and even after the revolt headed
by Waller had dethroned him from the position, Dryden, his successor in the
same monarchy, while declining to allow him the praise of "the best poet"
(that is, the most exact follower of the rules and system of versifying
which Dryden himself preferred), allowed him to be "the greatest wit of the
nation."

His life concerns us little, and its events are not disputed, or rather, in
the earlier part, are still rather obscure. Born in 1573, educated at both
universities and at Lincoln's Inn, a traveller, a man of pleasure, a
law-student, a soldier, and probably for a time a member of the Roman
Church, he seems just before reaching middle life to have experienced some
religious change, took orders, became a famous preacher, was made Dean of
St. Paul's, and died in 1631.

It has been said that tradition and probability point to the composition of
most, and that all but ce