And in _The Anniversary_ he retracts all that he had once said about inconstancy:
"Here upon earth we are Kings, and none but we Can be such Kings, nor of such subjects be. Who is so safe as we, where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two? True and false fears let us refrain; Let us live nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write three-score: This is the second of our reign."
There are few lovelier lyrics than _Break of Day_:
"Stay, O sweet, and do not rise; The light that shines comes from thine eyes; The day breaks not, it is my heart, Because that you and I must part. Stay, or else my joys will die And perish in their infancy."
Or, to take a complete poem, none shows Donne in truer, finer light than _The Dream_:
"Dear love, for nothing less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths, and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best, Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.
As lightning, or a taper's light, Thine eyes, and not thy noise waked me; Yet I thought thee --For thou lovest truth--an angel, at first sight; But when I saw thou saw'st my heart, And knew'st my thoughts beyond an angel's art, When thou knew'st what I dreamt, when thou knew'st when Excess of joy would wake me, and earnest then, I must confess, it could not choose but be Profane, to think thee anything but thee."
There is enough nastiness, eccentricity, coarseness, roughness and extravagance in Donne to put off many fastidious readers: but his faults lie open to the sky: his beauties are frequently hidden, but they are worth searching for.
And yet--a word of warning--let George Saintsbury give it: "No one who thinks _Don Quixote_ a merely funny book, no one who sees in Aristophanes a dirty-minded fellow with a knack of Greek versification ... need trouble himself even to attempt to like Donne."
We read Donne, then, for his fiery imagination, for his deep and subtle analysis, for his humanity, for his passion, for his anti-sentimentalism, for his eager search "to find a north-west passage of his own" in intellect and morals, for the richness and rarity of the gems with which all his work, both prose and poetry, is studded, for his modernity and freshness. We read Donne as a corrective of lazy thinking: he frees us from illusion.