A Little English Gallery. Louise Imogen Guiney
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be away;” and went back after to his “sallads and onions” at Mitcham, or to his solitary lodgings near Whitehall.
The attachment, close and deferent on both sides, was continued without a breach, and with the intention, at least, of “almost daily letters.” Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, so saluted Mrs. Emerson: “You have helped to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was his dear lady’s to John Donne, often heretofore astray in the slough of doubt and dissipation; she fed more than his little children, clothed more than his body, and fostered anew in him that faith in humanity which is the well-spring of good works. He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s innocent temperament, who could accept benefits gladly and gracefully from any appreciator; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her accustomed citadels. But this loving help, thrust upon him, he took with dignity, and after 1621, when he was able, in his own person, to befriend others, he gave back gallantly to mankind the blessings he once received from two or three. It was something for Magdalen Herbert to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose fantastic but real force swayed generations of thinking and singing men; it was something, also, to have won in return the words which were his gold coin of payment. Nowhere is Donne’s sentiment more genuine, his workmanship more happy and less complex, than in the verses dedicated to her blameless name. They have a lucidity unsurpassed among the yet straightforward lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton so much of his noble extravagance;
“Queens hereafter shall be glad to live
Upon the alms of thy superfluous praise.”
Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems of the sort, there is little personality to be detected; the homage has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and awed. Donne gives, sometimes, the large Elizabethan measure:
“Is there any good which is not she?”
In the so-called Elegy, The Autumnal, written on leaving Oxford, he starts off with a well-known cherishable strophe:
“No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.”
The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly chronological:
“If we love things long-sought, age is a thing
Which we are fifty years in compassing;
If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.”
It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman in her yet sunshiny forties, and a most comely woman to boot, should have required prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and kindred damages. Was life so hard as that in “the spacious days”? Shakespeare, in agreement with Horace, had already reminded his handsome “Will” of the pitiless and too expeditious hour,
“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field!”
which also seems, to a nice historical sense, somewhat staggering. The close of Donne’s little homily is perfect, and full of the winning melancholy which was part of his birthright in art, whenever he allowed himself direct and homely expression:
“May still
My love descend! and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties; so
I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.”
Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. She must have been early and thoroughly familiar with his manuscripts, which were passed about freely, Dr. Grosart thinks, prior to 1613, and which burned what Massinger would call “no adulterate incense” to herself. Her bays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a frequent influence on Donne’s work, which is not traceable now. He seems to have had a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose inheritance
“Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,”
not unconnected with the fact that some one else was Magdalen also; never does he tire of dwelling on the coincidence and the difference. In one of his quaintly moralizing songs, he goes seeking a “true-love” primrose, where but on Montgomery Hill! for he is hers, by all chivalrous tokens, as much as he may be. Again he cites, and almost with humor:
“that perplexing eye
Which equally claims love and reverence.”
And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some fine lines:
“So much do I love her choice, that I
Would fain love him that shall be loved of her!”
There was prescience in that couplet. As early, at least, as 1607–8, the widow’s long privacy ended, probably while she was at her “howse at Charing Cross,” watching over the progress of her son George at Westminster School; and he that was “loved of her” was the grandson of the last Lord Latimer of the Nevilles, junior brother of a nobleman who perished with Essex in 1602, and brother and heir of that Sir Henry Danvers who was created Earl of Danby in 1625 for his services in Ireland, and who literally left a green memory as the founder of the pleasant Physic Gardens at Oxford. The name of Danvers, the kindly step-father, is one of the noteworthy omissions of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Autobiography. But George Herbert was devoted to him, as his many letters show, and turned to him, never in vain, during his restless years at Cambridge; and into his circle of relatives, with romantic suddenness, he afterwards married. Sir John Danvers, of Dauntsey, Wilts, was twenty years younger than his wife. It is worth while to quote the very deft and courtly statement of the case made at the last by Dr. Donne: “The natural endowments of her person were such as had their part in drawing and fixing the affections of such a person as by his birth and youth and interest in great favors at court, and legal proximity to great possessions in the world, might justly have promised him acceptance in what family soever, or upon what person soever, he had directed. … He placed them here, neither diverted thence, nor repented since. For as the well-tuning of an instrument makes higher and lower strings of one sound, so the inequality of their years was thus reduced to an evenness, that she had a cheerfulness agreeable to his youth, and he had a sober staidness conformable to her more advanced years. So that I would not consider her at so much more than forty, nor him at so much less than thirty, at that time; but as their persons were made one and their fortunes made one by marriage, so I would put their years into one number, and finding a sixty between them, think them thirty apiece; for as twins of one hour they lived.”[5]
In the August of 1607, a masque by John Marston was given in the now ruined castle of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, eighteen miles from Leicester, as an entertainment devised by Lord Huntingdon and his young wife, the Lady Elizabeth Stanley, to welcome her mother, Alice, Countess-Dowager of Derby,[6] “the first night of her honor’s arrival at the house of Ashby.” Fourteen noble ladies took part in the masque, and among them was “Mris Da’vers.” The name may, perhaps, be recognized as that of the subject of this sketch, for Sir John Danvers was not knighted until the following year; and it has been so recognized by interested scholars who have searched Nichols’s Progresses of James I. And yet we cannot be too sure that we have her before us, in the wreaths and picturesque draperies of the amateur stage; for there was another Mistress Da’vers at court, whose purported letter, dated February 3, 1613, signed with her confusing Christian names of “Mary Magdaline,” gave great trouble, thirty years ago, to the experts of the Camden Society. Besides, a letter of the good gossipy Chamberlain, dated March 3, 1608–9, mentions as if it were then a piece of fresh news: “Young Davers is likewise wedded to the widow Herbert, Sir Edward’s mother, of more than twice his age.” This would seem to preclude the possibility of the fair masquer being the same person.
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