[In 'Much Ado about Nothing.'] Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more; Men were deceivers ever;

One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never: Then sigh not so,

But let them go,

And be you blithe and bonny;
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into, Hey nonny, nonny.

Sing no more ditties, sing no more
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,

Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so, &c.

[In Cymbeline."]
Fear no more the heat o' th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' th' great,
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke;
Care no more to clothe and eat,

To thee the reed is as the oak. The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash,

Nor th' all-dreaded thunder stone; Fear not slander, censure rash,

Thou hast finished joy and moan.
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.

No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have,
And renowned be thy grave!

[From As you Like it."]

Under the green-wood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note

Unto the sweet bird's throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither;

Here shall he see

No enemy

But winter and rough weather.

SIR JOHN DAVIES (1570-1626), an English barrister, at one time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was the author of a long philosophical poem, On the Soul of Man and the Immortality thereof, supposed to have been written in 1598, and one of the earliest poems of that kind in our language. Davies is a profound thinker and close reasoner: in the happier parts of his poem,' says Campbell, 'we come to logical truths so well illustrated by ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts more poetically or philosophically just.

The judgment and fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction.' The versification of the poem (long quatrains) was afterwards copied by Davenant and Dryden. Mr Southey has remarked that Sir John Davies and Sir William Davenant, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, wrote in numbers which, for precision, and clearness, and felicity, and strength, have never been surpassed.' The compact structure of Davies's verse is indeed remarkable for his times. In another production, entitled Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing, in a Dialogue between Penelope and One of her Wooers, he is much more fanciful. He there represents Penelope as declining to dance with Antinous, and the latter as proceeding to lecture her upon the antiquity of that elegant exercise, the merits of which he describes in verses partaking, as has been justly remarked, of the flexibility and grace of the subject. The following is one of the most imaginative passages:

[The Dancing of the Air.]

And now behold your tender nurse, the air,
And common neighbour, that aye runs around,
How many pictures and impressions fair
Within her empty regions are there found,
Which to your senses dancing do propound;
For what are breath, speech, echoes, music, winds,
But dancings of the air in sundry kinds?
For when you breathe, the air in order moves,

Now in, now out, in time and measure true;
And when you speak, so well she dancing loves,
That doubling oft, and oft redoubling new,
With thousand forms she doth herself endue:
For all the words that from your lips repair,
Are nought but tricks and turnings of the air.
Hence is her prattling daughter, Echo, born,
That dances to all voices she can hear :
There is no sound so harsh that she doth scorn,
Nor any time wherein she will forbear
The airy pavement with her feet to wear :
And yet her hearing sense is nothing quick,
For after time she endeth ev'ry trick.

And thou, sweet Music, dancing's only life,
The ear's sole happiness, the air's best speech,
Loadstone of fellowship, charming rod of strife,

The soft mind's paradise, the sick mind's leech, With thine own tongue thou trees and stones can teach,

That when the air doth dance her finest measure,
Then art thou born, the gods' and men's sweet
pleasure.

Lastly, where keep the Winds their revelry,
Their violent turnings, and wild whirling hays,
But in the air's translucent gallery?

Where she herself is turn'd a hundred ways,
While with those maskers wantonly she plays:
Yet in this misrule, they such rule embrace,
As two at once encumber not the place.

Afterwards, the poet alludes to the tidal influence of the moon, and the passage is highly poetical in expression:

For lo, the sea that fleets about the land,

And like a girdle clips her solid waist, Music and measure both doth understand: For his great crystal eye is always cast Up to the moon, and on her fixed fast: And as she danceth in her pallid spheres So danceth he about the centre here.

Sometimes his proud green waves in order set,
One after other flow into the shore,
Which when they have with many kisses wet,
They ebb away in order as before;
And to make known his courtly love the more,
He oft doth lay aside his three-fork'd mace,
And with his arms the timorous earth embrace.

The poem on Dancing is said to have been written in fifteen days. It was published in 1596. The Nosce Teipsum, or Poem on the Immortality of the Soul, bears the date (as appears from the dedication to the Queen) of 1602. The fame of these works introduced Sir John Davies to James I., who made him successively solicitor-general and attorney-general for Ireland. He was also a judge of assize, and was knighted by the king in 1607. The first Reports of Law Cases, published in Ireland, were made by this able and accomplished man, and his preface to the volume is considered the best that was ever prefixed to a law-book.'

[Reasons for the Soul's Immortality.]

Again, how can she but immortal be,
When, with the motions of both will and wit,
She still aspireth to eternity,

And never rests till she attain to it?

All moving things to other things do move
Of the same kind, which shows their nature such;
So earth falls down, and fire doth mount above,
Till both their proper elements do touch.
And as the moisture which the thirsty earth
Sucks from the sea to fill her empty veins,
From out her womb at last doth take a birth,
And runs a lymph along the grassy plains,
Long doth she stay, as loath to leave the land,
From whose soft side she first did issue make;
She tastes all places, turns to every hand,
Her flowery banks unwilling to forsake.

Yet nature so her streams doth lead and carry
As that her course doth make no final stay,
Till she herself unto the sea doth marry,
Within whose watʼry bosom first she lay..
E'en so the soul, which, in this earthly mould,
The spirit of God doth secretly infuse,
Because at first she doth the earth behold,
And only this material world she views.

At first her mother earth she holdeth dear,
And doth embrace the world and worldly things;
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings :
Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be.

For who did ever yet, in honour, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health,
Or, having wisdom, was not vex'd in mind?

Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall,
Which seem sweet flow'rs, with lustre fresh and gay,
She lights on that, and this, and tasteth all,
But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away.
So, when the soul finds here no true content,
And, like Noah's dove, can no sure footing take,
She doth return from whence she first was sent,
And flies to him that first her wings did make.

[The Dignity of Man.]

Oh! what is man, great Maker of mankind! That thou to him so great respect dost bear; That thou adorn'st him with so bright a mind, Mak'st him a king, and even an angel's peer? Oh! what a lively life, what heav'nly pow'r, How great, how plentiful, how rich a dow'r What spreading virtue, what a sparkling fire,

Dost thou within this dying flesh inspire! Thou leav'st thy print in other works of thine, But thy whole image thou in man hast writ; There cannot be a creature more divine, Except, like thee, it should be infinite: But it exceeds man's thought, to think how high God hath rais'd man, since God a man became ; The angels do admire this mystery,

And are astonish'd when they view the same: Nor hath he given these blessings for a day, Nor made them on the body's life depend; The soul, though made in time, survives for aye; And though it hath beginning, sees no end.

JOHN DONNE.

JOHN DONNE was born in London in 1573, of a Catholic family; through his mother he was related to Sir Thomas More and Heywood the epigrammatist. He was educated partly at Oxford and partly at Cambridge, and was designed for the law, but relinquished the study in his nineteenth year. About this period of his life, having carefully considered the controversies between the Catholics and Protestants, he became convinced that the latter were right, and became a member of the established church. The great abilities and amiable character of Donne were early distinguished. The Earl of Essex, the Lord Chancellor Egerton, and Sir Robert Drury, successively befriended and employed him; and a saying of the second of these eminent persons respecting him is recorded by his biographers-that he was fitter to serve a king than a subject. He fell, nevertheless, into trouble, in consequence of secretly marrying the daughter of Sir George Moore, lord lieutenant of the Tower. This step kept him for several years in poverty, and by the death of his wife, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, he was plunged into the greatest grief. At the age of forty-two, Donne became a clergyman, and soon attaining distinction as a preacher, he was preferred by James I. to the deanery of St Paul's; in which benefice he continued till his death in 1631, when he was buried honourably in Westminster Abbey.

The works of Donne consist of satires, elegies, religious poems, complimentary verses, and epigrams: they were first collected into one volume by Tonson in 1719. His reputation as a poet, great in his own day, low during the latter part of the seventeenth, and the whole of the eighteenth centuries, has latterly in some degree revived. In its days of abasement, critics spoke of his harsh and rugged versification, and his leaving nature for conceit: Dryden even hints at the necessity of translating him into numbers and English. It seems to be now acknowledged that, amidst much rubbish, there is much real poetry, and that of a high order, in Donne. He is described by a recent critic as 'imbued to saturation with the learning of his age,' endowed with a most active and piercing intellect -an imagination, if not grasping and comprehensive, most subtle and far-darting-a fancy, rich,

vivid, and picturesque-a mode of expression terse, simple, and condensed-and a wit admirable, as well for its caustic severity, as for its playful quickness -and as only wanting sufficient sensibility and taste to preserve him from the vices of style which seem

Monumental Effigy of Dr Donne.

to have beset him. Donne is usually considered as the first of a series of poets of the seventeenth century, who, under the name of the Metaphysical Poets, fill a conspicuous place in English literary history. The directness of thought, the naturalness of description, the rich abundance of genuine poetical feeling and imagery, which distinguish the poets of Elizabeth's reign, now begin to give way to cold and forced conceits, mere vain workings of the intellect, a kind of poetry as unlike the former as punning is unlike genuine wit. To give an idea of these conceits-Donne writes a poem on a familiar popular subject, a broken heart. Here he does not advert to the miseries or distractions which are presumed to be the causes of broken hearts, but starts off into a play of conceit upon the phrase. He entered a room, he says, where his mistress was present, and

love, alas!

At one first blow did shiver it [his heart] as glass.

Then, forcing on his mind to discover by what means the idea of a heart broken to pieces, like glass, can be turned to account in making out something that will gingle on the reader's imagination, he proceeds thus:

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be empty quite,
Therefore I think my breast hath all

Those pieces still, though they do not unite:
And now, as broken glasses show

A hundred lesser faces, so

My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,
But after one such love can love no more.

There is here, certainly, analogy, but then it is an analogy which altogether fails to please or move :

it is a mere conceit. Perhaps we should not be far from the truth, if we were to represent this style as the natural symptoms of the decline of the brilliant school of Sackville, Spenser, and Shakspeare. All the recognised modes, subjects, and phrases of poetry, introduced by them and their contemporaries, were now in some degree exhausted, and it was necessary to seek for something new. This was found, not in a new vein of equally rich ore, but in a continuation of the workings through adjoining veins of spurious metal.

It is at the same time to be borne in mind, that the quality above described did not characterise the whole of the writings of Donne and his followers. These men are often direct, natural, and truly poetical-in spite, as it were, of themselves. Donne, it may be here stated, is usually considered as the first writer of that kind of satire which Pope and Churchill carried to such perfection. But his satires, to use the words of a writer already quoted, are rough and rugged as the unhewn stones that have just been blasted from the quarry.

The specimens which follow are designed only to exemplify the merits of Donne, not his defects:

Valediction-Forbidding Mourning.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go;
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
The breath goes now-and some say, no;
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
"Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull, sublunary lover's love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which alimented it.
But we're by love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is;1
Inter-assured of the mind,

Careless eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls, therefore (which are one)
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

1 That is, absence.