mpliments, like the rhymed letters to Mrs. Herbert and Lady Bedford.
Miracles of this sort are not wrought save by the heart. We do not find in
them the underground and sardonic element that appears in so much of
Donne's merely amorous work. We no longer picture him as a sort of Vulcan
hammering out the poetry of base love, raucous, powerful, mocking. He
becomes in them a child Apollo, as far as his temperament will allow him.
He makes music of so grave and stately a beauty that one begins to wonder
at all the critics who have found fault with his rhythms--from Ben Jonson,
who said that "for not keeping accent, Donne deserved hanging," down to
Coleridge, who declared that his "muse on dromedary trots," and described
him as "rhyme's sturdy cripple." Coleridge's quatrain on Donne is, without
doubt, an unequalled masterpiece of epigrammatic criticism. But Donne rode
no dromedary. In his greatest poems he rides Pegasus like a master, even
if he does rather weigh the poor beast down by carrying an encyclopaedia
in his saddle-bags.

Not only does Donne remain a learned man on his Pegasus, however: he also
remains a humorist, a serious fantastic. Humour and passion pursue each
other through the labyrinth of his being, as we find in those two
beautiful poems, _The Relic_ and _The Funeral_, addressed to the lady who
had given him a bracelet of her hair. In the former he foretells what will
happen if ever his grave is broken up and his skeleton discovered with

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

People will fancy, he declares, that the bracelet is a device of lovers

To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at the grave and make a little stay.

Bone and bracelet will be worshipped as relics--the relics of a Magdalen
and her lover. He conjectures with a quiet smile:

All women shall adore us, and some men.

He warns his worshippers, however, that the facts are far different from
what they imagine, and tells the miracle seekers what in reality were "the
miracles we harmless lovers wrought":

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we lov'd, nor why;
Difference of sex no more we knew
Than our guardian angels do;
Coming and going, we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals;
Our hands ne'er touch'd the seals,
Which nature, injur'd by late law, sets free:
These miracles we did; but now, alas!
All measure, and all language I should pass,
Should I tell