brutality involved, but rather emphasises and insists upon it. For the moment his audacity in facing and minutely analysing consequences gives zest to his love or is a proof of the strength of passion which makes even this ingredient tolerable. But, when the passion declines, the feeling will turn into remorse, and perhaps is already, though half-consciously, remorse in disguise.
The interpretation may seem over subtle, but subtlety was the essence of Donne's nature. Both the student and the wild gallant appear in the poems of this date, and they are strangely combined in the qualities which led Johnson to describe Donne and his followers as the 'metaphysical' school. Literary critics have dwelt sufficiently upon the far-fetched conceits which gained currency at the same time in other countries. They are, it would seem, the natural utterances of the schoolman coming to court. Donne was all this time plunged in his omnivorous studies of divinity and philosophy. The philosophy in which he had been initiated at the Universities meant, of course, the still dominant scholastic philosophy. To reason was to 'syllogise'; to suppose that all truth was attainable by constructing vast piles of syllogism, defining, distinguishing,
