one to whom the rapture of
solution is the blossoming of pure reason. Read the poem called _The
Ecstasy_, which seems to anticipate a metaphysical Blake; it is all
close reasoning, step by step, and yet is what its title claims for it.

It may be, though I doubt it, that other poets who have written personal
verse in English, have known as much of women's hearts and the senses of
men, and the interchanges of passionate intercourse between man and
woman; but, partly by reason of this very method of saying things, no
one has ever rendered so exactly, and with such elaborate subtlety,
every mood of the actual passion. It has been done in prose; may one not
think of Stendhal, for a certain way he has of turning the whole forces
of the mind upon those emotions and sensations which are mostly left to
the heat of an unreflective excitement? Donne, as he suffers all the
colds and fevers of love, is as much the sufferer and the physician of
his disease as we have seen him to be in cases of actual physical
sickness. Always detached from himself, even when he is most helplessly
the slave of circumstances, he has that frightful faculty of seeing
through his own illusions; of having no illusions to the mind, only to
the senses. Other poets, with more wisdom towards poetry, give us the
beautiful or pathetic results of no matter what creeping or soaring
passions. Donne, making a new thing certainly, if not always a thing of
beauty, tells us exactly what a man really feels as he makes love to a
woman, as he sits beside her husband at table, as he dreams of her in
absence, as he scorns himself for loving her, as he hates or despises
her for loving him, as he realises all that is stupid in her devotion,
and all that is animal in his. 'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to
love,' he tells her, in a burst of angry contempt, priding himself on
his superior craft in the art. And his devotions to her are exquisite,
appealing to what is most responsive in woman, beyond those of tenderer
poets. A woman cares most for the lover who understands her best, and is
least taken in by what it is the method of her tradition to feign. So
wearily conscious that she is not the abstract angel of her pretence and
of her adorers, she will go far in sheer thankfulness to the man who can
see so straight into her heart as to have

found something like a heart,
But colours it and corners had;
It was not good, it was not bad,
It w