t when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A
memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw
under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a chimera in my brain, troubles me
in my prayer.' It is this brain, turned inward upon itself, and darting
out on every side in purely random excursions, that was responsible, I
cannot doubt, for all the contradictions of a career in which the inner
logic is not at first apparent.

Donne's career divides itself sharply into three parts: his youth, when
we see him a soldier, a traveller, a lover, a poet, unrestrained in all
the passionate adventures of youth; then a middle period, in which he is
a lawyer and a theologian, seeking knowledge and worldly advancement,
without any too restraining scruple as to the means which come to his
hand; and then a last stage of saintly living and dying. What then is
the link between these successive periods, the principle of development,
the real Donne in short? 'He was none of these, or all of these, or
more,' says Mr. Gosse. But, surely, he was indeed all of these, and his
individuality precisely the growth from one stage to another, the subtle
intelligence being always there, working vividly, but in each period
working in a different direction. 'I would fain do something, but that I
cannot tell what is no wonder.' Everything in Donne seems to me to
explain itself in that fundamental uncertainty of aim, and his
uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches,
nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction
at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious,
insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he
'can do nothing constantly.'

His three periods, then, are three stages in the search after a way to
walk in, something worthy of himself to do. Thus, of his one printed
collection of verse he writes: 'Of my _Anniversaries_, the fault which I
acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse,
which, though it have excuse, even in our times, by example of men,
which one would think should as little have done it as I, yet I confess
I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself.' Of his legal
studies he writes in the same letter: 'For my purpose of proceeding in
the profession of the law, so far as to a title, you may be pleased to
correct that imagination where you find it. I ever thought the study of
it my best entert