Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/33

Rh But similar touches are almost everywhere. The enshrining once for all in the simplest words of a universal thought—

The selection of single adjectives to do the duty of a whole train of surplusage—

meet us, and tell us what we have to expect in all but the earliest. In comparison with these things, such a poem as ‘Go and catch a falling star,’ delightful as it is, is perhaps only a delightful quaintness, and ‘The Indifferent’ only a pleasant quip consummately turned. In these perversities Donne is but playing tours de force. His natural and genuine work re-appears in such poems as ‘Canonization,’ or as ‘The Legacy.’ It is the fashion sometimes, and that not always with the worst critics, to dismiss this kind of heroic rapture as an agreeable but conscious exaggeration, partly betrayed and partly condoned by flouting-pieces like those just mentioned. The gloss does not do the critic’s knowledge of human nature or his honesty in acknowledging his knowledge much credit. Both moods and both expressions are true; but the rapture is the truer. No one who sees in