Page:The Poems of John Donne - 1896 - Volume 1.djvu/34

xxx these mere literary or fashionable exercises, can ever appreciate such an aubade as ‘Stay, O Sweet, and do not rise,’ or such a midnight piece as ‘The Dream,’ with its never-to-be-forgotten couplet—

If there is less quintessence in ‘The Message,’ for all its beauty, it is only because no one can stay long at the point of rapture which characterizes Donne at his most characteristic, and the relaxation is natural—as natural as is the pretty fancy about St. Lucy—

the day under her invocation being in the depths of December. But the passionate mood, or that of mystical reflection, soon returns, and in the one Donne shall sing with another of the wondrous phrases where simplicity and perfection meet—

Or in the other dwell on the hope of buried lovers—

I am not without some apprehension that I