or
Take, O take those lips away.
And strangest of all perhaps is the tenderness which came into Donne's poetry when a sincere passion quickened in his heart, for tenderness, the note of
O wert thou in the cauld blast,
is the last quality one would look for in the poetry of a nature at once so intellectual and with such a capacity for caustic satire. But the beautiful if not flawless Elegy XVI,
By our first strange and fatal interview,
and the Valedictions which he wrote on different occasions of parting from his wife, combine with the peculiar élan of all Donne's passionate poetry and its intellectual content a tenderness as perfect as anything in Burns or in Browning:
O more than Moone,
Draw not up seas to drowne me in thy spheare,
Weepe me not dead in thine armes, but forbeare