cient time,
Who held plurality of loves no crime!

But even then he looks forward, not with cynicism, to a time when he

Shall not so easily be to change dispos'd,
Nor to the arts of several eyes obeying;
But beauty with true worth securely weighing,
Which, being found assembled in some one,
We'll love her ever, and love her alone.

By the time he writes _The Ecstasy_ the victim of the body has become the
protesting victim of the soul. He cries out against a love that is merely
an ecstatic friendship:

But O alas, so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?

He pleads for the recognition of the body, contending that it is not the
enemy but the companion of the soul:

Soul into the soul may flow
Though it to body first repair.

The realistic philosophy of love has never been set forth with greater
intellectual vehemence:

So must pure lovers' souls descend
T' affections and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.
To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow
But yet the body is the book.

I, for one, find it impossible to believe that all this passionate
verse--verse in which we find the quintessence of Donne's genius--was a
mere utterance of abstract thoughts into the wind. Donne, as has been
pointed out, was more than most writers a poet of personal experience. His
greatest poetry was born of struggle and conflict in the obscure depths of
the soul as surely as was the religion of St. Paul. I doubt if, in the
history of his genius, any event ever happened of equal importance to his
meeting with the lady who first set going in his brain that fevered
dialogue between the body and the soul. Had he been less of a frustrated
lover, less of a martyr, in whom love's

Art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness,

much of his greatest poetry, it seems to me, would never have been
written.

One cannot, unfortunately, write the history of the progress of Donne's
genius save by inference and guessing. His poems were not, with some
unimportant exceptions, published in his lifetime. He did not arrange them
in chronological or in any sort of order. His poem on the flea that has
bitten both him and his inamorata comes after the triumphant
_Anniversary_, and but a page or two before the