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. These verses of Donne's disturbed and adventurous youth, poems ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the music as of birds' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age: nor have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser's. Donne in youth was not at ease with himself: he speculates too curiously. He may try to play the sensualist, but there is a dark backward in his genius; there are chords not in tune with mirth and pleasure. He is as unique as Browning, as little like other poets. If his Elegies contain, as has been supposed, the story of a love affair, it was of a nature to make him uneasy. In 1597 Donne became secretary of the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, and met his niece, Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. He married her secretly at the end of 1601, and therefore was imprisoned in the Fleet jail, in February, 1602, thanks to the lady's angry father, who soon after forgave the young lovers. By 1601 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or "Metempsychosis," the adventures of a soul "placed in most shapes,"[1] for example, in that fabulous and mortuary weed, a mandrake, in the roe of a fish, in a sparrow, and so forth, all to little purpose. He was unemployed, eager for employment, given to writing long letters, and laments for deaths in verse, and he assisted in a controversy with the Catholics.