'By our strange and fatal interview.'
Isaak Walton relates how the poet, one evening, as he sat alone in Paris, saw his wife appearing to him in vision, with a dead infant in her arms—a proof at once of the strength of his love and of his imagination. This beloved and admirable woman died in 1617, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, and Donne's grief approached distraction.
When he had reached the forty-second year of his age, our poet, at the instance of King James, became a clergyman, and was successively appointed Chaplain to the King, Lecturer to Lincoln's Inn, Dean of St Dunstan's in the West, and Dean of St Paul's. In the pulpit he attracted great attention, particularly from the more thoughtful and intelligent of his auditors. He continued Dean of St Paul's till his death, which took place in 1631, when he was approaching sixty. He died of consumption, a disease which seldom cuts down a man so near his grand climacteric.
'He was buried,' says Campbell, 'in St Paul's, where his figure yet remains in the vault of St Faith's, carved from a painting, for which he sat a few days' (it should be weeks) 'before his death, dressed in his winding-sheet.' He kept this portrait constantly by his bedside to remind him of his mortality.
Donne's Sermons fill a large folio, with which we were familiar in boyhood, but have not seen since. De Quincey says, alluding partly to them, and partly to his poetry,—'Few writers have shewn a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne, for he combined—what no other man has ever done—the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the 'Metempsychosis,'—thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus; while a diamond-dust of rhetorical brilliances is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.' We beg leave to differ, in some degree, from De Quincey in his estimate of the 'Metempsychosis,' or 'The Progress of the Soul,' although we have given it entire. It has too many far-fetched conceits and obscure allegories, although redeemed, we admit, by some very precious thoughts, such as
'This soul, to whom Luther and Mahomet were Prisons of flesh.'
Or the following quaint picture of the apple in Eden—
'Prince of the orchard, fair as dawning morn,
Fenced with the law, and ripe as soon as born.'
Or this—
'Nature hath no jail, though she hath law.'