every creature in which it has lived, and so goes on adding to the complexity of its nature. Donne inscribes his work 'poema satyricon,' and many touches in the completed section justify the title, but it was not intended to be a satire of fugitive fashions and customs. No other satirist ever expounded his design in such a strain of impassioned sublimity.

I sing the progress of a deathless soul,

Whom Fate-which God made but doth not control

Placed in most shapes; all times before the law
Yoked us, and when, and since, in this I sing;
And the great world to his aged evening
From infant morn, through manly noon I draw;
What the gold Chaldee, or silver Persiar saw
Greek brass, or Roman iron, is in this one;
A work to outwear Seth's pillars, brick and stone,
And, Holy Writ excepted, made to yield to none.

Thee, eye of Heaven, this great soul envies not.
By thy male force is all we have begot.
In the first East, thou now begin'st to shine,
Suck'st early balm, and Island spices there.
And wilt anon in thy loose-reined career

At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night thy Western land of Mine;
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
That before thee one day began to be,

And thy frail light being quenched shall long long outlive thee.

Before setting out on his great enterprise, the poet appeals to Destiny to show him his fate, that he may not waste his strength in vain, and rob his grave of its due.

Great Destiny, the Commissary of God,
That hast marked out a path and period

For everything; who, when we offspring took,
Our ways and ends see'st at one instant; Thou
Knot of all causes; Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne'er smiles nor frowns, O vouchsafe thou to look,
And show my story in Thy eternal book.
That (if my prayer be fit) I may understand
So much myself, as to know with what hand,
How scant or liberal, this my life's race is spanned.

To my six lustres, almost now outwore,2
Except thy book owe me so many more;
Except my legend be free from the lets
Of steep ambition, sleepy poverty,
Spirit-quenching sickness, dull captivity,
Distracting business, and from beauty's nets,

And all that calls from this and the other whets;

O let me not launch out, but let me save

The expense of brain and spirit; that my grave
His right and due, a whole unwasted man may have.

The poem was begun in 1601, when Donne was twenty-eight years old.

According to the Pythagorean doctrine, the soul in its wanderings may lodge in plants as well as animals. The soul whose progress Donne aspired to trace had its first dwelling-place on the fatal tree in Paradise.

For this great soul, which here amongst us now

Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow,
Which as the Moon the sea, moves us; to hear
Whose story with long patience you will long;
For 'tis the crown and last strain of my song;
This soul to whom Luther and Mahomet were
Prisons of flesh; this soul which oft did tear
And mend the cracks of the Empire and late Rome,
And lived where every great change did come

Had first in Paradise a low but fatal room.

It was in the apple which Adam and Eve ate.

6

Prince of the orchard, fair as dawning morn,
Fenced with the law, and ripe as soon as born;
That apple grew which this soul did enlive.

When the slight veins and tender conduit pipe' through which the soul drew life and growth to this apple were broken by the serpent's grip, it fled in search of a tenement to a dark and foggy plot, and gave life to a mandrake. This is his description of the beginnings of growth in the plant when the soul has quickened it.

His right arm he thrust out towards the East,
Westward his left; the ends did themselves digest
Into the lesser strings-these fingers were:

And as a slumberer stretching on his bed

This way he this and that way scattered

His other leg, which feet with toes upbear.

After a few transmigrations among smaller animals, the wandering soul was placed by Destiny in a very roomful house,' the body of a whale, a vast antediluvian monster.

At every stroke his brazen fins do take
More circles in the broken sea they make
Than cannons' voices when the air they tear:
His ribs are pillars, and his high-arched roof
Of bark, that blunts best steel, is thunder-proof;
Swim in him swallowed dolphins without fear,
And feel no sides, as if his vast womb were
Some inland sea; and ever as he went

He spouted rivers up as if he meant

To join our seas with seas above the firmament.

He hunts not fish, but as an officer
Stays in his Court, at his own net, and there
All suitors of all sorts themselves enthrall;
So on his back lies this whale wantoning,
And in his gulf-like throat sucks everything
That passeth near. Fish chaseth fish, and all,

That thousand guiltless smalls to make one great should die?

Touches of satire like the above hit at the abuses of the courts of law are intermingled with the main flow of the descriptive story. Every stage in the soul's progress is made to yield some sarcastic lesson for the times, some political or social maxim.

If Donne had completed the original design of this great poem, and traced the fortunes of the soul-the hero of the epic-through all the great political and religious epochs of Roman history, it would have been an achievement worthy of his extraordinary powers. But to have realised this if, he would have needed the addition to his many splendid gifts of still another, the gift of perseverance. The Progress of the Soul' completed in the same high strain with which it begins would have been a great monument, but it would have been a monument of a different type of man from Donne. The fragment, as it stands, represents him perfectly in the extent as well as in the limitation of his powers. It breaks off abruptly and unworthily, with a commonplace scoff at the wickedness of women.

She knew treachery

Rapine, deceit, and lust and ills enough

To be a woman; Themech she is now,

Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plow.

He takes leave of his Soul when it has reached this halting-place as if he were tired of pursuing its history.

It must be admitted that Donne belongs to the class of failures in literature-failures, that is to say, for the purpose of making an enduring mark, of accomplishing work which should be a perpetual possession to humanity. He was a failure, not from lack of power, but from superabundance. No single faculty had the lead in his richly endowed organisation. No one mood had sufficient strength to overbear all others, and compel all his powers into its service. It may be thought that this is only another way of saying that Donne was a man of amazing talents without being a man of genius. Yet there is no poet of the Shakespearian age to whom it would be more inappropriate to deny the rank of genius, in any conceivable acceptation of the term. If we take talent to be the power of adroitly manipulating common material into common forms, no man had less of it than Donne. He had an invincible repugnance to the commonplace. Everything is his own, alike the thought and the instrument by which it is expressed. He is no man's debtor. He digs his own ore, and uses it according to his own fancies.

For the widest and most enduring kind of reputation, talent is as necessary as genius. He who writes for the greatest number must

have both. Donne was confirmed in the exclusive cultivation of his genius by the conditions under which he wrote. His poems were not intended for wide publicity; they were intended for the delight and amusement of a small circle among whom they were circulated in manuscript. There is much in them that does not accord with our ideas of refinement and culture; but we must make allowance for changes of taste, and the circle for which Donne wrote had at least this much of the characteristics of refinement and culture that it was weary and impatient of commonplace. There is always the danger with such select circles, that they put themselves in antagonism to the dominant spirit of their time. We may almost say in fact that this antagonism is an inevitable element in the atmosphere of sentiments and ideas that gathers round a group who have separated themselves from the crowd and organised any sort of intellectual or artistic aristocracy. Their shibboleths are coloured by it, and much of their work is inspired by it. The men who write for such an aristocracy must be content with a limited popularity in their own time, and must be prepared for a very rapid diminution in the numbers of their audience as time rolls on and generation after generation forms for itself its own watchwords of culture. A generation is represented to posterity by its best commonplace, and those who do not enter the main stream but stand critically on the banks or disport themselves in retired eddies soon pass from the notice of all but the curious explorers of the past.

WILLIAM MINTO.

THE PINCH OF POVERTY.

IN these days of reduction of rents, or of total abstinence from rentpaying, it is, I am told, the correct thing to be a little pressed for money.' It is a sign of connection with the landed interest (like the banker's ejaculation in Middlemarch) and suggests family acres, and entails, and a position in the county. (In which case I know a good many people who are landlords on a very extensive scale, and have made allowances for their tenants the generosity of which may be described as Quixotic.) But as a general rule, and in times less exceptionally hard, though Shakespeare tells us 'How apt the poor are to be proud,' they are not proud of being poor.

'Poverty,' says the greatest of English divines, is indeed despised and makes men contemptible; it exposes a man to the influences of evil persons, and leaves a man defenceless; it is always suspected; its stories are accounted lies, and all its counsels follies; it puts a man from all employment; it makes a man's discourses tedious and his society troublesome. This is the worst of it.' Even so poverty seems pretty bad, but, begging Dr. Jeremy Taylor's pardon, what he has stated is by no means 'the worst of it.' To be in want of food at any time, and of firing in winter time, is ever so much worse than the inconveniences he enumerates; and to see those we love-delicate women and children perhaps in want of them, is worse still. The fact is, the excellent bishop probably never knew what it was to go without his meals, but took them 'reg'lar' (as Mrs. Gamp took her Brighton ale) as bishops generally do. Moreover, since his day, Luxury has so universally increased, and the value of Intelligence has become so well recognised (by the publishers) that even philosophers, who profess to despise such things, have plenty to eat, and good of its kind too. Hence it happens that, from all we hear to the contrary from the greatest thinkers, the deprivation of food is a small thing: indeed, as compared with the great spiritual struggles of noble minds, and the doubts that beset them as to the supreme government of the universe, it seems hardly worth mentioning.

In old times, when folks were not so 'cultured,' starvation was thought more of. It is quite curious, indeed, to contrast the highflying morality of the present day (when no one is permitted, either