This is the highest level that Donne ever reached in eloquence inspired by the vision of the joy and not the terror of the Christian faith, higher than anything in the _Second Anniversary_, but in his last hymns hope and confidence find a simpler and a tenderer note. The noble hymn, 'In what torn ship so ever I embark,' is in somewhat the same anguished tone as the _Holy Sonnets_; but the highly characteristic Since I am coming to that Holy roome, Where with thy Quire of Saints for evermore, I shall be made thy Musique; and the _Hymn to God the Father_, speak of final faith and hope in tones which recall--recall also by their sea-coloured imagery, and by their rhythm--the lines in which another sensitive and tormented poet-soul contemplated the last voyage: I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne My last thred, I shall perish on the shore; Swear by thy self that at my death thy sunne Shall shine as he shines now and heretofore: And having done that, Thou hast done, I feare no more. Beside the passion of these lines even Tennyson's grow a little pale: Twilight and evening bell And after that the dark; And may there be no sadness of farewell When I embark: For though from out our bourne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crost the bar. It has not been the aim of the present editor to attempt to pronounce a final judgement upon Donne. It seems to him idle to compare Donne's poetry with that of other poets or to endeavour to fix its relative worth. Its faults are great and manifest; its beauties _sui generis_, incommunicable and incomparable. My endeavour here has been by an analysis of some of the different elements in this composite work--poems composed at different times and in different moods; flung together at the end so carelessly that youthful extravagances of witty sensuality and pious aspirations jostle each other cheek by jowl; and presenting a texture so diverse from that of poetry as we usually think of it--to show how many are the strands which run through it, and that one of these is a poetry, not perfect in form, rugged of line and careless in rhyme, a poetry in which intellect and feeling are seldom or never perfectly fused in a work that is of imagination all compact, yet a poetry of an extraordinarily arresting and haunting quality, passionate, thoughtful, and with a deep melody of its own. [Footnote 1: _History of English Poetry_, iii. 154. Mr. Courthope qualifies this statement somewhat on the next page: 'From this spirit of cynical lawlessness he was perhaps reclaimed by genuine love,' &c. But he has, I think, insufficiently analysed the diverse strains in Donne's love-poetry.]