her saw.
All other things to their destruction draw,
Only our love hath no decay;
This no to-morrow hath, no yesterday;
Running, it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

This lover loves with his whole nature, and so collectedly because
reason, in him, is not in conflict with passion, but passion's ally. His
senses speak with unparalleled directness, as in those elegies which
must remain the model in English of masculine sensual sobriety. He
distinguishes the true end of such loving in a forcible,
characteristically prosaic image:

Whoever loves, if he do not propose
The right true end of love, he's one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

And he exemplifies every motion and the whole pilgrim's progress of
physical love, with a deliberate, triumphant, unluxurious explicitness
which 'leaves no doubt,' as we say 'of his intentions,' and can be no
more than referred to passingly in modern pages. In a series of hate
poems, of which I will quote the finest, he gives expression to a whole
region of profound human sentiment which has never been expressed, out
of Catullus, with such intolerable truth.

When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
And that thou think'st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign'd vestal, in worse arms shall see:
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call'st for more,
And, in false sleep, will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I'd rather thou should'st painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

Yet it is the same lover, and very evidently the same, who winnows all
this earthly passion to a fine, fruitful dust, fit to make bread for
angels. Ecstatic reason, passion justifying its intoxication by
revealing the mysteries that it has come thus to apprehend, speak in the
quintessence of Donne's verse with an exalted simplicity which seems to
make a new language for love. It is the simplicity of a perfectly
abstract geometrical problem, solved by