This is not precisely the way in which we suffer ourselves nowadays to talk about truth, but a few generations back, people still cherished a healthy predilection for the comfortable delusions of life. Mingling with the music of the sweet old love-songs, lurking amid their passionate protestations, there is always a subtle sense of insecurity, a good-humored desire to enjoy the present, and not peer too closely into the perilous uncertainties of the future. Their very exaggerations, the quaint and extravagant conceits which offend our more exacting taste, are part of this general determination to be wisely blind to the ill-bred obtrusiveness of facts. Accordingly there is no staying the hand of an Elizabethan poet, or of his successor under the Restoration, when either undertakes to sing his lady’s praises. Sun, moon, and skies bend down to do her homage, and to acknowledge their own comparative dimness. “Stars, indeed, fair creatures be,” admits Wither indulgently, and pearls and rubies are not without their merits; but when the beauty of Arete dawns upon him, all things else seem dull and vapid by her side. Nay, his poetry, even, is born of her complaisance, his talents are fostered by her smiles, he gains distinction only as her favor may permit. “I no skill in numbers had, More than every shepherd’s lad, Till she taught me strains that were Pleasing to her gentle ear. Her fair splendour and her worth From obscureness drew me forth. And, because I had no muse, She herself deigned to infuse All the skill by which I climb To these praises in my rhyme.” Donne, the most ardent of lovers and the most crabbed of poets, who united a great devotion to his fond and faithful wife with a remarkably poor opinion of her sex in general, pushed his adulations to the extreme verge of absurdity. We find him writing to a lady sick of a fever that she cannot die because all creation would perish with her,-- “The whole world vapours in thy breath.” After which ebullition, it is hardly a matter of surprise to know that he considered females in the light of creatures whom it had pleased Providence to make fools. “Hope not for mind in women!” is his warning cry; at their best, a little sweetness and a little wit form all their earthly portion. Yet the note of true passion struck by Donne in those glowing addresses, those dejected farewells to his wife, echoes like a cry of rapture and of pain out of the stillness of the past. Her sorrow at the parting rends his heart; if she but sighs, she sighs his soul away. “When thou weep’st, unkindly kind, My life’s blood doth decay. It cannot be That thou lov’st me, as thou say’st, If in thine my life thou waste; Thou art the life of me.” Again, in that strange poem “A Valediction of Weeping,” he finds her tears more than he can endure; and, with the fond exaggeration of a lover, he entreats forbearance in her grief:--