From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,
    Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;
    And soonest[79] our best men with thee do go,
  Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery! 
    Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;
  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
    And better than thy stroke.  Why swell’st[80] thou then? 
  One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
  And death shall be no more:  Death, thou shalt die.

In a poem called The Cross, full of fantastic conceits, we find the following remarkable lines, embodying the profoundest truth.

  As perchance carvers do not faces make,
  But that away, which hid them there, do take: 
  Let crosses so take what hid Christ in thee,
  And be his image, or not his, but he.

One more, and we shall take our leave of Dr. Donne.  It is called a fragment; but it seems to me complete.  It will serve as a specimen of his best and at the same time of his most characteristic mode of presenting fine thoughts grotesquely attired.

  RESURRECTION.

  Sleep, sleep, old sun; thou canst not have re-past[81]
  As yet the wound thou took’st on Friday last. 
  Sleep then, and rest:  the world may bear thy stay;
  A better sun rose before thee to-day;
  Who, not content to enlighten all that dwell
  On the earth’s face as thou, enlightened hell,
  And made the dark fires languish in that vale,
  As at thy presence here our fires grow pale;
  Whose body, having walked on earth and now
  Hastening to heaven, would, that he might allow
  Himself unto all stations and fill all,
  For these three days become a mineral. 
  He was all gold when he lay down, but rose
  All tincture; and doth not alone dispose
  Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
  Of power to make even sinful flesh like his. 
  Had one of those, whose credulous piety
  Thought that a soul one might discern and see
  Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,
  And issuing from the sheet this body seen,
  He would have justly thought this body a soul,
  If not of any man, yet of the whole.

What a strange mode of saying that he is our head, the captain of our salvation, the perfect humanity in which our life is hid!  Yet it has its dignity.  When one has got over the oddity of these last six lines, the figure contained in them shows itself almost grand.

As an individual specimen of the grotesque form holding a fine sense, regard for a moment the words,

  He was all gold when he lay down, but rose
  All tincture;

which means, that, entirely good when he died, he was something yet greater when he rose, for he had gained the power of making others good:  the tincture intended here was a substance whose touch would turn the basest metal into gold.