The thought is Donne's, but not the airy note, the easy style, or the tripping prosody. Donne never writes of absence in this cheerful, confident strain. He consoles himself at times with the doctrine of inseparable souls, but the note of pain is never absent. He cannot cheat his passionate heart and senses with metaphysical subtleties. The song _Farewell to love_, the second in the list of poems added in _1635_, is found only in _O'F_ and _S96_. There is therefore no weighty external evidence for assigning it to Donne, but no one can read it without feeling that it is his. The cynical yet passionate strain of wit, the condensed style, and the metaphysical turn given to the argument, are all in his manner. As printed in _1635_ the point of the third stanza is obscured. As I have ventured to amend it, an Aristotelian doctrine is referred to in a way that only Donne would have done in quite such a setting. The three _Elegies_, XII, XIII, and XIV (7, 8, 9 in the list), must also be assigned to Donne, unless some more suitable candidate can be advanced on really convincing grounds. The first of the three, _His parting from her_, is so fine a poem that it is difficult to think any unknown poet could have written it. In sincerity and poetic quality it is one of the finest of the _Elegies_,[15] and in this sincerer note, the absence of witty paradox, it differs from poems like _The Bracelet_ and _The Perfume_ and resembles the fine elegy called _His Picture_ and two other pieces that stand somewhat apart from the general tenor of the _Elegies_, namely, the famous elegy _On his Mistris_, in which he dissuades her from travelling with him as a page: By our first strange and fatal interview, and that rather enigmatical poem _The Expostulation_, which found its way into Jonson's _Underwoods_: To make the doubt clear that no woman's true, Was it my fate to prove it strong in you? All of these poems bear the imprint of some actual experience, and to this cause we may perhaps trace the comparative rareness with which _His parting from her_ is found in manuscripts, and that it finally appeared in a mutilated form. The poet may have given copies only to a few friends and desired that it should not be circulated. In the Second Collection of poems in _TCD_ it is signed at the close, 'Sir Franc: Wryothlesse.' Who is intended by this I do not know. The ascriptions in this collection are many of them purely fanciful. Still, that the poem is Donne's rests on internal evidence alone.