The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.” Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also, to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment. Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble extravagance; “Queens hereafter shall be glad to live Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.” Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure: “Is there any good which is not she?” In the so-called _Elegy, The Autumnal_, written on leaving Oxford, he starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe: “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.” The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly chronological: “If we love things long-sought, age is a thing Which we are fifty years in compassing; If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day.” It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life so hard as that in “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and too expeditious hour, “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!”