s work,
the _Biathanatos_, is an attempt to show that "the scandalous disease
of headlong dying," to which Donne himself in his unhappy moods had
"often such a sickly inclination," was not necessarily and essentially
sinful.

In 1610 Donne formed the acquaintance of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Robert
Drury of Hawsted, who offered him and his wife an apartment in his large
house in Drury Lane. Drury lost his only daughter, and in 1611 Donne
published an extravagant elegy on her, entitled _An Anatomy of the
World_, to which he added in 1612 a _Progress of the Soul_ on the same
subject; he threatened to celebrate the "blessed Maid," Elizabeth Drury,
in a fresh elegy on each anniversary of her death, but he happily
refrained from the third occasion onwards. At the close of 1611 Sir
Robert Drury determined to visit Paris (but not, as Walton supposed, on
an embassy of any kind), and he took Donne with him. When he left
London, his wife was expecting an eighth child. It seems almost certain
that her fear to have him absent led him to compose one of his loveliest
poems:

"Sweetest Love, I do not go
For weariness of thee."

He is said to have had a vision, while he was at Amiens, of his wife,
with her hair over her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms, on
the very night that Mrs Donne, in London (or more probably in the Isle
of Wight), was delivered of a still-born infant. He suffered,
accordingly, a great anxiety, which was not removed until he reached
Paris, where he received reassuring accounts of his wife's health. The
Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the
Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London.
In 1613 Donne contributed to the _Lachrymae lachrymarum_ an obscure and
frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous
Marriage Song for St Valentine's Day to celebrate the nuptials of the
elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne
became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards
the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at
court. Donne was now in weak health, and in a highly neurotic condition.
He suggested to Rochester that if he should enter the church, a place
there might be found for him. But he was more useful to the courtier in
his legal capacity, and Rochester dissuaded him from the ministry. At
the close of 1614, however, the king sent for Donne to