From what we know of the lives of Essex, Raleigh, Southampton, Pembroke, and others it is probable that Donne's _Elegies_ come quite as close to the truth of life as Sidney's Petrarchianism or Spenser's Platonism. The later cantos of _The Faerie Queene_ reflect vividly the unchaste loves and troubled friendships of Elizabeth's Court. Whether we can accept in its entirety the history of Donne's early amours which Mr. Gosse has gathered from the poems or not, there can be no doubt that actual experiences do lie behind these poems as behind Shakespeare's sonnets. In the one case as in the other, to recognize a literary model is not to exclude the probability of a source in actual experience. But however we may explain or palliate the tone of these poems it is impossible to deny their power, the vivid and packed force with which they portray a variously mooded passion working through a swift and subtle brain. If there is little of the elegant and accomplished art which Milton admired in the Latin Elegiasts while he 'deplored' their immorality, there is more strength and sincerity both of thought and imagination. The brutal cynicism of Fond woman which would have thy husband die, the witty anger of _The Apparition_, the mordant and paradoxical wit of _The Perfume_ and _The Bracelet_, the passionate dignity and strength of _His Picture_, My body a sack of bones broken within, And powders blew stains scatter'd on my skin, the passion that rises superior to sensuality and wit, and takes wing into a more spiritual and ideal atmosphere, of _His parting from her_, I will not look upon the quick'ning Sun, But straight her beauty to my sense shall run; The ayre shall note her soft, the fire most pure; Water suggest her clear, and the earth sure-- compare these with Ovid and the difference is apparent between an artistic, witty voluptuary and a poet whose passionate force redeems many errors of taste and art. Compare them with the sonnets and mythological idylls and _Heroicall Epistles_ of the Elizabethans and it is they, not Donne, who are revealed as witty and 'fantastic' poets content to adorn a conventional sentiment with mythological fancies and verbal conceits. Donne's interest is his theme, love and woman, and he uses words not for their own sake but to communicate his consciousness of these surprising phenomena in all their varying and conflicting aspects. The only contemporary poems that have the same dramatic quality are Shakespeare's sonnets and some of Drayton's later sonnets. In Shakespeare this dramatic intensity and variety is of course united with a rarer poetic charm. Charm is a quality which Donne's poetry possesses in a few single lines. But to the passion which animates these sensual, witty, troubled poems the closest parallel is to be sought in Shakespeare's sonnets to a dark lady and in some of the verses written by Catullus to or of Lesbia: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.