I would not have the heart of one who could read these lines, and think only of their rugged style, and faults of taste and expression. The superior power of truth and sentiment have immortalised this little poem, and the occasion which gave it birth. The wife and husband parted, and he left with her another little poem, which he calls a "Valediction, forbidding to mourn." When Donne was at Paris, and still suffering under the grief of this separation, he saw, or fancied he saw, the apparition of his wife pass through the room in which he sat, her hair dishevelled and hanging down upon her shoulders, her face pale and mournful, and carrying in her arms a dead infant. Sir Robert Drury found him a few minutes afterwards in such a state of horror, and his mind so impressed with the reality of this vision, that an express was immediately sent off to England, to inquire after the health of Mrs. Donne. She had been seized, after the departure of her husband, with a premature confinement; had been at the point of death; but was then out of danger, and recovering. This incident has been related by all Donne's biographers, by some with infinite solemnity, by others with sneering incredulity. I can speak from experience, of the power of the imagination to impress us with a palpable sense of what is _not_, and cannot be; and it seems to me that, in a man of Donne's ardent, melancholy temperament, brooding day and night on the one sad idea, a high state of nervous excitement is sufficient to account for this impression, without having recourse to supernatural agency, or absolute disbelief. Donne, after several years of study, was prevailed on to enter holy orders; and about four years afterwards, his amiable wife died in her twelfth confinement.[51] His grief was so overwhelming, that his old friend Walton thinks it necessary thus to apologise for him:--"Nor is it hard to think (being that passions may be both changed and heightened by accidents,) but that the abundant affection which was once betwixt him and her, who had so long been the delight of his eyes and the companion of his youth; her, with whom he had divided so many pleasant sorrows and contented fears, as common people are not capable of, should be changed into a commensurable grief." He roused himself at length to his duties; and preaching his first sermon at St. Clement's Church, in the Strand, where his beloved wife lay buried, he took for his text, Jer. iii. v. 1,--"Lo! I am the man that hath seen affliction;" and sent all his congregation home in tears. * * * * * Among Donne's earlier poetry may be distinguished the following little song, which has so much more harmony and elegance than his other pieces, that it is scarcely a fair specimen of his style. It was long popular, and I can remember when a child, hearing it sung to very beautiful music.