Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/30

xxvi of the few pieces of his which have been praised enough, if not even a little overpraised. Asa matter of taste it seems to me indeed more open to exception than the equally famous and much “fie-fied” ‘To his mistress going to bed,’ a piece of frank naturalism redeemed from coarseness by passion and poetic completeness. The Elegies again are the most varied of the divisions of Donne’s works, and contain next to the Satires his liveliest touches, such as—

or as the stroke—

In Epithalamia Donne was good, but not consummate, falling far short of his master, Spenser, in this branch. No part of his work was more famous in his own day than his ‘Epistles’ which are headed by the ‘Storm’ and ‘Calm,’ that so did please Ben Jonson. But in these and other pieces of the same division, the misplaced ingenuity which is the staple of the general indictment against Donne, appears, to my taste, less excusably than anywhere else. Great passion of love, of grief, of philosophic meditation, of religious awe, had the power to