Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all Could none by his right name, but thunder call: Lightning was all our light, and it rain'd more Than if the Sunne had drunke the sea before. . . . . . . . . . Hearing hath deaf'd our sailors, and if they Knew how to hear, there's none knowes what to say: Compared to these stormes, death is but a qualme, Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calme. The sense of tropical heat and calm in the companion poem is hardly less oppressive, and, if the whole is not quite so happy as the first, it contains two lines whose vivid and unexpected felicity is as delightful to-day as when Ben Jonson recited them to Drummond at Hawthornden: No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay Feathers and dust, to-day and yesterday. Donne's letters generally fall into two groups. The first comprises those addressed to his fellow-students at Cambridge and the Inns of Court, the Woodwards, Brookes, and others, or to his maturer and more fashionable companions in the quest of favour and employment at Court, Wotton, and Goodyere, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. To the other belong the complimentary and elegant epistles in which he delighted and perhaps bewildered his noble lady friends and patronesses with erudite and transcendental flattery. In the first class, and the same is true of some of the _Satyres_, notably the third, and of the satirical _Progresse of the Soule_, especially at the beginning and the end, the reflective, moralizing strain predominates. Donne's 'wit' becomes the instrument of a criticism of life, grave or satiric, melancholy or stoical. Despite Matthew Arnold's definition, verse of this kind seldom is poetry in the full sense of the word; but, as Stevenson says in speaking of his own Scotch verses, talk not song. The first of English poets was a master of the art. Neither Horace nor Martial, whom Stevenson cites, is a more delightful talker in verse than Geoffrey Chaucer, and the archaism of his style seems only to lend the additional charm of a lisp to his babble. Since Donne's day English poetry has been rich in such verse talkers--Butler and Dryden, Pope and Swift, Cowper and Burns, Byron and Shelley, Browning and Landor. It did not come easy to the Elizabethans, whose natural accent was song. Donne's chief rivals were Daniel and Jonson, and I venture to think that he excels them both in the clear and pointed yet easy and conversational development of his thought, in the play of wit and wisdom, and, despite the pedantic cast of Elizabethan erudite moralizing, in the power to leave on the reader the impression of a potent and yet a winning personality. We seem to get nearer to the man himself in Donne's letters to Goodyere and Wotton than in Daniel's weighty, but also heavy, moralizing epistles to the Countess of Cumberland or Sir Thomas Egerton; and the personality whose voice sounds so distinct and human