'T was last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility,—
to be constant. The sun is chidden for too early rising—
Go tell Court-huntsmen that the King will ride,—
but leave lovers undisturbed. In "The Indifferent" he brags that he can love all sorts and conditions of women, like Lord Byron and other amorists. He finds in himself "something like a heart," but rather rumpled. Of a later period, when he met his future wife, may be a charming song,
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air and angel's purity'
'Twixt women's love and men's will ever be.
But the Elegies address ladies of whose nature purity is no part, and it may be admitted that the confessions do not win admiration for Donne's taste and temper, not to mention his morals, when he wrote them. "The Curse" on a woman, or a man who loves his mistress, far outdoes the Epodes of Horace in cold ferocity. "The Bait" contains remarks on the cruelty of angling which must have vexed Izaak Walton to the heart. "Love's Deity," opening with the charmed lines
I long to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born,
thence descends into crabbed and difficult conceits. Two songs, "The Funeral" and "The Relic," are on a bracelet of his mistress's hair: whoever exhumes the poet's body will find
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.