In return for these poems Drury housed and took care of Donne and his large family. The poet now became the adviser of the Earl of Somerset in the hideous suit of nullity, and, when things went against Somerset, who had done nothing for him, Donne proposed to publish his poems in "a few copies". "I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution," and indeed, as Donne at this moment intended to take holy orders, which he did in January, 1615, he was wise in breaking his resolution. He now obtained some clerical appointments, but in August, 1617, lost his wife. There is little doubt that his grief changed him from a worldly man into a man of heartfelt piety, the man whom Izaak Walton knew and adored. His "Holy Sonnets," written at this time, have some noble almost Miltonic passages, mingled with lines that cannot be made to scan, and with hyperbolical conceits. Thus, though Thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. He requests the American explorers to lend him "new seas," so that he may drown his world in tears of penitence. He makes "yet" rhyme to "spi_rit._". The excuse made for such things is that Donne thought Elizabethan poetry too dulcet. He is a poet by flashes, which are very brilliant with strange coloured fires. He is not really so obscure as he is reckoned: he _can_ be understood, though Ben Jonson, who "esteemed him the first poet in the world in some things," added that "Donne from not being understood would perish". Donne died on March 31, 1631. His poetry, styled by Dr. Johnson "metaphysical," exercised an influence not wholly favourable on his successors; happily it did not affect Lovelace and Herrick. Minor Lyrists. In the Elizabethan age it might almost be said that every man was his own poet. The name of poet became a term of contempt, as we learn from Ben Jonson and other sources. Of the best lyrists we have spoken in treating of the dramatists, of Sidney, Raleigh, and the chief sonneteers. Another sonneteer is Thomas Watson, an Oxford man, and allied to Spenser's circle (15571592). His "Hecatompathia" (1582) and "Tears of Fancy" (posthumously published) are sonnets, either informal or formal in structure; the "Hecatompathia" mainly consists of translations from modern languages. Watson had learning and some skill, but not much natural music in his soul. Henry Constable, a Yorkshire man and a Catholic, may have been born about 1562 or earlier, judging by his degree taken at Cambridge in 1580. He passed much of his life abroad, and, on his return, part of it an the Tower, in the last years of Elizabeth. His sonnets ("Diana," 1592-1594) are pleasing, more tunable than many sonnets of his own and the succeeding age. Others have been exhumed from manuscript; some are devotional.