A sympathizing reader, aware of sequences, may wonder whence Sir John drew “all the powers he can make”! The dignified letter, with its undulating syntax and thrifty punctuation, harmonizes with all we know of this delightful woman, who could so reproach what she deemed a shortcoming, without a touch of temper. How affectionate is the reference to the “little Florence” who died young, and to the other children, sufficiently precious to all that household, except to the wool-gathering chevalier their father, far away! Their innocent faces peer again through a sweet postscript of their grand-uncle: (“Dick is here, Ned and Bettye at Haughmond,”) written in the winter, from Eyton, to the truant at the Hague.[8] This same genial Sir Francis Newport, “imoderately desyring to see you,” confides to his nephew, during what he complains of as “a verye drye and hott time”[9] for Shropshire farmers, that “mye syster your mother is confident to take a iourney into these pts this somer, the rather, I think, because yo’r brother Vaugh’n is dead & if yo’ have a willing harte you maye come tyme enough to acco’pany her heare, & would not then the companye bee much the better?” But we fear the little excursion never came off. Edward Herbert’s next visit to his home, presumably after a four-years’ absence, was in 1619; and in May of that year he accepted the office of Ambassador to France, and spread his ready wing again to the Continent. And the Athenæ Oxoniensis will not let us forget that the too spirited envoy had to be temporarily recalled in 1621, because he had “irreverently treated” De Luynes, the powerful but good-for-nothing Constable of France. It is not insignificant that this was the year in which George Herbert wrote to his mother in one of his consoling moods, bidding her be of good cheer, albeit her health and wealth were gone, and the conduct of her children was not very satisfying!
We know that Lady Danvers had the “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence, none of her serene charm. Her poet was much with her in his advancing age. In July, 1625, while the plague was raging in London, Donne reminded Sir Henry Wotton of the leisure he enjoyed, golden as Cicero’s, by dating his letter “from S’r John Davor’s house at Chelsey, of w’ich house & my Lord Carlil’s at Hanworth I make up my Tusculum.” Many a peaceful evening must they have passed upon the terraces, within sound of the solemn songs always dear to both. Visitors yet more illustrious came there from the city; for the noble hostess had once the privilege of reviving the great Lord Bacon,[10] who had fainted in her garden. We learn, with sympathy, that “sickness, in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing of melancholy; not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had, sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s ministering angel before him, after thirty years of mutual fealty. Her restless son Edward, now at home, was already eminent, and wearing his little Irish title of Baron Castleisland; her thoughtful Charles was long dead; her brother, also, was no more; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite George married and in holy orders,[11] and after a life which left a wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the early June of 1627. On the eighth day of the month, in St. Luke’s, the parish church of Chelsea, she was buried:
“Old age with snow-bright hair, and folded palm,”
the final earthly glimpse of her still traditionally beautiful. On the first of July her faithful liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s and Vicar of St. Dunstan-in-the-West, preached her funeral sermon there, before a crowd of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s tears, and felt his breaking voice, the voice of one who did not belie his friend, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how joyous she had been. “She died,” he said, “without any change of countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music, a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and sharpness of wit.” His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going; and a haunting line of his youth,
“And all my pleasures are like yesterday,”
must have reverted to him many and many a time. Morbid and persistent thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in his failing sight;[12] morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his loneliness, and crowding out the better vision which yet may “grace us in the disgrace of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre, sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “going into dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year . . . which, while I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he ended in a wholesomer strain, subdued and calm: “This good soul being thus laid down to sleep in His peace, ‘I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her not!’”
The rare little duodecimo which contains Lady Danvers’s funeral sermon was printed soon after, “together with other Commemorations of Her, by her Sonne G. Herbert,” and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in Paul’s Churchyard. The commemorations are in Greek and Latin. Strangely enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of The Temple so set upon his prosody, so given to awkward pagan conceits, so out of tune with the ideals of classic diction. But he, who tenderly loved his mother, has given to us, in the Memoriæ Matris Sacrum, several precious personal fragments, and one more precious whole picture of daily habits in the lines beginning Corneliæ sanctæ: her morning prayer, her bath, and the plaiting of her glossy hair; her housewifely cares, her fit replies, her writing to her friends, her passion for music, her gentle helpfulness; the long felicity of a glad and stainless life,
“Quicquid habet tellus, quicquid et astra, fruens.”
Dr. Donne died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to some he loved was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, “engraven very small on heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to whom his heart would have turned, the “autumnal beauty” scarce second among them, had preceded him out of England. But in travelling towards his Maker, he had that other sacred hope to “ebb on with them,” and gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covered him in old St. Paul’s: “Hic licet in occiduo cinere, aspicit eum cujus nomen est Oriens.” The tie between himself and her was not unremembered in the next generation; for we find John Donne the younger dedicating his father’s posthumous work to Francis, Lord Newport, and when making his will, in 1662, bequeathing also to the same Lord Newport “the picture of St. Anthony in a round frame.” And thus, in a revived fragrance, the annals of true friendship close.
These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make the only possible biography of Lady Danvers. When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire correspondence with Dr. Donne before him.[13] “There were sacred endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us, but disappointingly hurries on into the highway of his subject. It is curious that it seems impossible now to trace these breathing relics, or others from the same source; for George Herbert, in the second elegy of the Parentalia, has much to say, and very sweetly, of the industry of his mother’s “white right hand,” and of the “many and most notable letters, flying over all the world.” Much detail is utterly lost which men who agree with Prosper Mérimée that all Thucydides would not be worth an authentic memoir of Aspasia, or even of one of the slaves of Pericles, might be glad to remember. A copy of a song, a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she moved, a guess through a mist at the blond head,[14] the half-imperious carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely lady, sentendosi laudare,—these are all we have of the daughter of England’s golden age. It would be easy, were it also just, to throw a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would like to verify the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the lion in Drake, and struck terror into the Devon towns; and to hear the young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with mellow contralto snatches of a Robin Hood ballad, or with the sweet yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang their arrows at forty paces; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and asked him of mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling from the “oracle of Apollo” in a London street. It is to be believed that one who watched events through the insurrection of Essex, through Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the national mourning for the Prince of Wales, through the fever for colonization, the savage sea-fights, the great intrigues in behalf of the Queen of Scots, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders, the stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century, was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s Euphues, fresh from the printers; the Arcadia made the talk of Oxford, in her prime; the dusky splendor of Marlowe’s Faustus was abroad before her second marriage. She was, surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the newest delighting madrigals and antiphons set forth by one Robert Jones, when every soul in England had the gift of music; of rascal Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, of Wyatt’s, Campion’s, and Drayton’s. She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them; her every step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor loss in literary circles escaped that tender “perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from a bench, in the pioneer British theatre, on the actors of Volpone, and followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings of the first dear Fool in King Lear, one day-after-Christmas at Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how any sociologist would enjoy having the honest opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of little Mistress Donne, concerning the person they could but thank and praise! Utinam vivisset Pepys! It is a cheat of history that it preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passer-by. Such, in truth, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her: the woman of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul whereof Sir Henry Wotton, who must have known her well, made his immortal song.