Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/20

xvi fancy of being painted in his shroud), on March 31, 1631. Broken health, the loss of his wife, the bitterness to a man who must have known himself to be one of the greatest intellects of the age, of hopes delayed till long past middle life, and no doubt also sincere repentance for and reaction from youthful follies, will account for much of the almost unparalleled melancholy which appears in his later works, and seems to have characterized his later life. But a considerable residue remains for natural idiosyncrasy, and for the influence of the Renaissance, the peculiar pessimism of which was perfectly different from that of classical times, and from that of our own day, and can only be paralleled by the spirit of Ecclesiastes.

The circumstances of his life however do not greatly concern us here; nor does that part—an eminent and admirable part—of his work which is not in verse. But it does concern us that there is a strange, though by no means unexampled, division between the two periods of his life and the two classes of his work. Roughly speaking, almost the whole of at least the secular verse belongs to the first division of the life, almost the whole of the prose to the second. Again, by far the greater part of the verse is animated by what may be called a spiritualized worldliness and sensuality, the