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 love 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.

Donne’s conversion as a lover was obviously as complete and revolutionary as his conversion in religion.

It is said, indeed, to have led to his conversion to passionate religion.  When his marriage with Sir George More’s sixteen-year-old daughter brought him at first only imprisonment and poverty, he summed up the sorrows of the situation in the famous line—­a line which has some additional interest as suggesting the correct pronunciation of his name: 

  John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone.

His married life, however, in spite of a succession of miseries due to ill-health, debt and thwarted ambition, seems to have been happy beyond prophecy; and when at the end of sixteen years his wife died in childbed, after having borne him twelve children, a religious crisis resulted that turned his conventional churchmanship into sanctity.  His original change from Catholicism to Protestantism has been already mentioned.  Most of the authorities are agreed, however, that this was a conversion in a formal rather than in a spiritual sense.  Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615, at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was brought to an end.  Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of entering the Church.  But we find him at the end of 1613 writing an epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury.  It is a curious fact that three great poets—­Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion—­appear, though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex’s sordid crime.  Donne’s temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the world.  His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower, is the jest of an ungenerous worldling.  Even after his admission into the Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more than L30 to pay his debts.  The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an affliction that might sour even a healthy nature.  The effect on a man of Donne’s ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous.  To such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to Swift.  One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less and less patient of his bars.  Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some