her worlds, the stars, to come nearer to him, and to give an account
of themselves') and Kepler ('who hath received it into his care, that no
new thing should be done in heaven without his knowledge'). He rebukes
himself for his abandonment to 'the worst voluptuousness, which is an
hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning and languages.' At
twenty-three he was a soldier against Spain under Raleigh, and went on
the 'Islands Voyage'; later on, at different periods, he travelled over
many parts of the Continent, with rich patrons or on diplomatic offices.
Born a Catholic, he became a Protestant, deliberately enough; wrote
books on controversial subjects, against his old party, before he had
taken orders in the Church of England; besides a strange, morbid
speculation on the innocence of suicide. He used his lawyer's training
for dubious enough purposes, advising the Earl of Somerset in the dark
business of his divorce and re-marriage. And, in a mournful pause in the
midst of many harrowing concerns, he writes to a friend: 'When I must
shipwreck, I would fain do it in a sea where mine own impotency might
have some excuse; not in a sullen, weedy lake, where I could not have so
much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something,
but that I cannot tell what is no wonder.' 'Though I be in such a
planetary and erratic fortune that I can do nothing constantly,' he
confesses later in the same letter.

No doubt some of this feverish activity, this uncertainty of aim, was a
matter of actual physical health. It is uncertain at what time the
wasting disease, of which he died, first settled upon him; but he seems
to have been always somewhat sickly of body, and with just that at times
depressing, at times exciting, malady which tells most upon the whole
organisation. That preoccupation with death, which in early life led him
to write his _Biathanatos_, with its elaborate apology for suicide, and
at the end of his life to prepare so spectacularly for the act of dying,
was but one symptom of a morbid state of body and brain and nerves, to
which so many of his poems and so many of his letters bear witness.
'Sometimes,' he writes, in a characteristic letter, 'when I find myself
transported with jollity and love of company, I hang lead to my heels,
and reduce to my thoughts my fortunes, my years, the duties of a man, of
a friend, of a husband, of a father, and all the incumbencies of a
family; when sadness dejects me,