A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mistress Essex Rich, from Amiens by John Donne

Madame- / Here, where by all all saints invokèd are, / 'Twere too much schism to be singular, / And 'gainst a practice general to war.

Yet turning to saints, should my humility / To other saints than you directed be, / That were to make my schism, heresy.

Nor would I be a convertite so cold, / As not to tell it; if this be too bold, / Pardons are in this market cheaply sold,

Where, because faith is in too low degree, / I thought it some apostleship in me / To speak things which by faith alone I see:

That is, of you, who are a firmament / Of virtues, where no one is grown, or spent; / They're your materials, not your ornament.

Others, whom we call virtuous, are not so / In their whole substance, but their virtues grow / But in their humours, and at seasons show.

For when through tasteless flat humidity / In dough-baked men some harmlessness we see, / 'Tis but his phlegm that's virtuous, and not he.

So is the blood sometimes; whoever ran / To danger unimportuned, he was then / No better than a sanguine virtuous man.

So cloistral men, who, in pretence of fear, / All contributions to this life forbear, / Have virtue in melancholy, and only there.

Spiritual choleric critics, which in all / Religions find faults, and forgive no fall, / Have through their zeal virtue but in their gall.

We're thus but parcel-gilt; to gold we're grown / When virtue is our soul's complexion; / Who knows his virtue's name or place, hath none.

Virtue's but aguish, when 'tis several, / By occasion waked, and circumstantial; / True virtue's soul, always in all deeds all.

This virtue, thinking to give dignity / To your soul, found there no infirmity, / For your soul was as good virtue as she.

She therefore wrought upon that part of you / Which is scarce less than soul, as she could do; / And so hath made your beauty, virtue too.

Hence comes it that your beauty wounds not hearts, / As others, with profane and sensual darts; / But as an influence, virtuous thoughts imparts.

But if such friends by th' honour of your sight / Grow capable of this so great a light, / As to partake your virtues and their might;

What must I think that influence must do, / Where it finds sympathy and matter too, / Virtue, and beauty of the same stuff, as you?

Which is, your noble worthy sister; she / Of whom, if what in this my ecstasy / And revelation of you both I see,

I should write here, as in short galleries / The master at the end large glasses ties, / So to present the room twice to our eyes,

So I should give this letter length, and say / That which I said of you; there is no way / From either, but by th' other, not to stray.