And if unfit for tombs or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And, if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns all shall approve
Us canoniz'd by love:

And thus invoke us: "You whom reverend love
Made one another's hermitage;
You to whom love was peace, that now is rage;
Who did the whole world's soul contract and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
(So made such mirrors, and such spies,
That they did all to you epitomize),
Countries, towns, courts. Beg from above
A pattern of your love!"

According to Walton, it was to his wife that Donne addressed the beautiful
verses beginning:

Sweetest love, I do not go
For weariness of thee;

as well as the series of _Valedictions_. Of many of the other love-poems,
however, we can measure the intensity but not guess the occasion. All that
we can say with confidence when we have read them is that, after we have
followed one tributary on another leading down to the ultimate Thames of
his genius, we know that his progress as a lover was a progress from