come singularly intimate with a fascinating and puzzling
creature, whom each of us may try to understand after his fashion, as we
try to understand the real secrets of the character of our friends.

Donne's mind, then, if I may make my own attempt to understand him, was
the mind of the dialectician, of the intellectual adventurer; he is a
poet almost by accident, or at least for reasons with which art in the
abstract has but little to do. He writes verse, first of all, because he
has observed keenly, and because it pleases the pride of his intellect
to satirise the pretensions of humanity. Then it is the flesh which
speaks in his verse, the curiosity of woman, which he has explored in
the same spirit of adventure; then passion, making a slave of him for
love's sake, and turning at last to the slave's hatred; finally,
religion, taken up with the same intellectual interest, the same subtle
indifference, and, in its turn, passing also into passionate reality. A
few poems are inspired in him by what he has seen in remote countries;
some are marriage songs and funeral elegies, written for friendship or
for money. But he writes nothing 'out of his own head,' as we say;
nothing lightly, or, it would seem, easily; nothing for the song's sake.
He speaks, in a letter, of 'descending to print anything in verse'; and
it is certain that he was never completely absorbed by his own poetry,
or at all careful to measure his achievements against those of others.
He took his own poems very seriously, he worked upon them with the whole
force of his intellect; but to himself, even before he became a divine,
he was something more than a poet. Poetry was but one means of
expressing the many-sided activity of his mind and temperament. Prose
was another, preaching another; travel and contact with great events and
persons scarcely less important to him, in the building up of himself.

And he was interested in everything. At one moment he is setting himself
to study Oriental languages, a singularly difficult task in those days.
Both in poetry and divinity he has more Spanish than English books in
his library. Scientific and technical terms are constantly found in his
verse, where we should least expect them, where indeed they are least
welcome. In _Ignatius--his Conclave_ he speaks with learned enthusiasm
of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and of his own immediate contemporaries,
then but just become famous, Galileo ('who of late hath summoned the
ot