An Outline Portrait

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women who have left a sort of fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, is surely one of these. Donne’s dear friend and Herbert’s mother, she rivals nearly, in the possibility of that noble epitaph, her unforgotten contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whose grave Ben Jonson penned his everlasting lines. If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of Sir Philip’s, it is at least more honor to own George Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke ; and it is not an inharmonious thing to remember, in calling up a memory as sweet as “ Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and Pembroke are yet, and have long been, married names.

Magdalen Newport was born in the red morning of the Elizabethan day. The sparse records of her youth leave us but the probable date, 1581-2, of her union with Richard Herbert of BlacheHall, Montgomery, black haired and bearded, as were all his line, of some learning and of noted courage, and descended from a brother of the great Sir Richard Herbert of Edward IV.’s time. Herself of an illustrious stock, with no sister and an only brother, she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “ the many fair coats the Newports bear " over their graves at Wroxeter.

At Eyton, Shropshire, in 1583, her eldest child was born, Edward, afterwards the celebrated Lord Herbert of Cherbury, still the puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a beautiful boy, not very mettlesome, and delicate in health, whose first speculation with his infant tongue was the piercing query, “ How came I into this world ?” But his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp, and went his frank, flashing, fighting way through Europe, “ with scars of four-and-twenty wounds upon him, to his grave ” at Bergen-op-Zoom; William, the third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles was reserved and studious, and died a dutiful Fellow of New College, Oxford. Fifth of these Herberts, “ a soul composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the name welcome among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the tower in Israel, the beloved “ parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years. “ You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once wrote him, in a mood more tender and simple than his wont, when all else of that radiant family had gone into dust. Youngest of Magdalen Newport’s sons was Thomas, “ a posthumous,” traveler, sailor, and master of a ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction, that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their generation. Margaret married a Vaughan. Let the flippant item be recorded that Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “ dear sick sister,” who became Mistress Jones. In the Lymore chancel of Montgomery church, where Richard Herbert the elder is buried, there was erected in 1600 a large alabaster canopied tomb, with two effigies recumbent. Standing all about (a quaint and affectionate boast) are small images of these seven sons and three daughters, — “ Job’s number and Job’s distribution,” as Dr. Donne did not fail to note, and as his loyal Walton chronicles after him. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered, and “ as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.”

Never had an army of brilliant and requiring children a more excellent mother. “ Severn parens,” her gentle George afterwards called her, in his scholarly verses ; and such she was, with a mingling of the sweet sagacity and joyousness which made up her character. “ God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, whom we wish were not so brief and meagre of detail, — “ God gave her such a comeliness as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was ample, her benevolence wide - spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living representative of the famous hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley. “ She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass on in a continual doing of good, as she received her daily bread from God, so daily she distributed it and imparted it to others.” In these years of her wifehood and widowhood, in Shropshire, at Oxford, in London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls, in an air of generosity and honor ; training them to habits of hardiness and simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “ Herself with her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house to whom John wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at young Richard’s turmoil in the house, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft, patient ways, and think of George as the child of content, “ the contesseration of elegancies ” worthy Archdeacon Oley called him.

The charming mother, a shrewd saint, always fair and stately in person, was not without comic prejudices. “ I was once,” Edward testifies, “ in danger of drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of more drowned than saved by it.” Though the reason failed to avail with him, he adds, the commandment did ; so that the accomplished Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting, —

even he lacked, on principle, the one art of keeping himself alive in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to die outright! It was a pretty, feminine paradox, and one which sets down our high-minded Magdalen as altogether human.

When Edward was little more than fifteen, and a student at Queen’s College, Oxford, he was wedded to his cousin, Mary Herbert, aged one-andtwenty, an heiress, and almost a philosopher. There was no wild affection on either side, but the marriage promised well, both being persons of resources ; and no real catastrophe befell either in after-life. Magdalen Newport, much as she desired the match for worldly motives, was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with masterly foresight, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery Castle with her younger children, in order to handle Mistress Herbert’s husband during his minority. “ She continued there with him,” says Walton in his Life of George Herbert, “ and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily ; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother,”

It was during this stay at Oxford that she contracted the chivalrous friendship which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,” as he called his profaner self) came accidentally to the university, during the most troubled year of his early prime, cast his bright eye on excellence, and in his own phrase, cited elsewhere, and as a generality, —

We can do no better than to quote a famous and beautiful passage, once more from Walton: “ This amity, begun at this time and place, was not an amity that, polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and virtues ; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula, whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues, that he might declare her just praises to posterity.”

Donne’s trenchant satires, some of the very best, in the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint of fame. Born in 1573, he was but ten years the senior of Edward Herbert; perhaps but another ten years the junior of Edward Herbert’s mother. To the son also he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting influence on his mind. Donne had the superabundance of mental power which a competent critic has lately pointed out as the very cause of his failure to become a great poet. He was high-spirited, unworldly, a man of many sides and moods, a lifelong dreamer of dreams, a restless, incisive intelligence, to which his contemporaries, Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had a sensitive conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There was a strain of strong joy in him : he was descended from two merryhearted gentlemen. John Heywood and Sir Thomas More. If ever man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was Donne in his “ yeasting youth.” Thrown from his old landmarks of religion and occupation (under circumstances which it is not expedient to examine here), and unable, despite his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight, when the friends most worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not let go by, — the making his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto themselves. Foremost among them, beside Mrs. Herbert, were Sir Robert Drury and a kinsman, Sir Francis Wolly, of Pirford, in Surrey, both of whom gave the Donnes the use of their princely houses. John Donne had been in the Chancellor’s service, and lost place and purse by his marriage with Anne Moore. No reverses could beat the pathetic cheer out of him.

“ Anne Donne, undone,” was one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow : “If God should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to the grave ; and with the youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes.

About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her chamber floor, the necessities of this family called for daily succors, and with simple, humble, noble delicacy they were supplied. Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was “ a bountiful benefactor, Donne as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from Micham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an inclosure of sonnets and hymns, — “ lost to us.” says Walton movingly,

“ but doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” The relationship, close and deferent on both side’s, was continued without a breach. Thoreau, quoting Chaucer, saluted his friend, who is yet living : “ You have helped to keep my life on loft.” No meaner service than this was Magdalen Herbert’s to John Donne : she fed more than his little children, clothed more than his body, and fostered in him that faith in humanity which is the wellspring of good works.

He was not a poet of Leigh Hunt’s innocent temperament, who could take benefits gladly and gracefully from any appreciator ; his soul dwelt too remote and proud in her accustomed citadels: but this loving vassalage, thrust, upon him, he bore with dignity; and no incident in his career outshines his hushed willingness that his friend should be also his preserver. It was something for Magdalen Newport to have saved a master-name to English letters, and kept in his unique place the poet, interesting beyond many, whose force, fantastic but real, swayed two 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, than in the strophes dedicated to her blameless name. There is a lucidity in these verses unsurpassed by the straightforward lyrics of their day. Drayton’s self, who died in the same year with Donne, might have addressed to the lady of Eyton his noble lines : —

Yet in these eulogies, as in most of the graver contemporaneous poems of the sort (those to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, for instance), there is little personality to be detected ; the homage has rather a floating outline, an unapproaching music, exquisite and reverent. Donne gives sometimes the large Elizabethan measure : —

In the so-called Elegy, The Autumnal, written on leaving Oxford, he starts off with the well - known cherishable strophe : —

The entire poem is a monody on the encroachments of years, and neatly chronological.

If transitory things, which soon decay, Age must be loveliest at the latest day.”

The twist of thought in the last lines is entirely characteristic. It strikes the modern ear as maladroit enough that a woman who could have been but a trifle over forty, and a beautiful woman to boot, should have required prosody’s ingenious excuses for wrinkles and gaps in the teeth. But no admissions stagger this laureate. The close, however, is perfect, and full of the winning melancholy which was part of Donne’s birthright in art, whenever he allowed himself direct and homely expression : —

Such was John Donne’s first known tribute to his friend. But her hays are to be gleaned off many a tree, and she must have cast a frequent, influence on his work, which is not traceable now. He seemed to have a Crashaw-like devotion to the Christian saint whose inheritance

and never could he forget that some one else was Magdalen also, nor fail to dwell on the coincidence and the difference. Again, he cites, and almost with humor, —

And his platonics make their honorable challenge at the end of some fine lines :

There was prescience in that couplet. In 1608, almost at the beginning of their intimacy, Magdalen Herbert’s widowhood ended, probably while she was at her house in London ; and he that was “loved of her” was the brother and heir of Lord Danvers, Earl of Danby, — the kindly stepfather, whose name is among the curious omissions of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Autobiography, but to whom, at least, George Herbert was devoted, as his letters show. 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 long after 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.”

We know that Lady Danvers had the “ honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,” which became her, and that she lost none of her influence, none of her serene charm. We learn with sympathy that “ sickness, in the declination of her years, had opened her to an overflowing of melancholy : not that she ever lay under that water, but yet had, sometimes, some high tides of it.” Death chose Dr. Donne’s friend before him, after nearly thirty years of mutual fealty. Her son Edward was already eminent, and wearing his little title of Baron Castleisland ; her thoughtful Charles was dead many a year; her daughters were matrons, and dwelling in prosperity. With but one unfulfilled wish, that of seeing her favorite George married and in orders, and after a life which left a wake of sunshine behind it in the world, very patiently and hopefully, Magdalen Newport, Lady Danvers, entered upon eternity, in the June of 1627.

These rapid, ragged strokes of a pen make her only possible biography When Walton wrote of her, he had the entire correspondence with Dr. Donne before him. “ There were sacred endearments betwixt these two excellent persons,” he assures us ; but that was a collateral matter, and turning into the highway of his subject, he cited no more of the incidental story we should have been proud to remember. A copy of a song, a reminiscence of the glow and stir of the days through which she moved, a guess through a mist at the blonde head, the half-imperious carriage, the open hand, as she went her ways, like Dante’s lovely lady, sentendosi laudare,—these are all we have of the Magdalen Newport whom England bore in the golden age. It would be easy, were it quite fair, to throw a dash of color into her shadowy history. One would give much to verify the scene at Eyton, while the news of the coming Armada roused the lion in Drake, and struck terror in the Devon towns ; and to hear the young wife, with three lisping Herberts at her knee, beguile them with mellow contralto snatches of Edom o’ Gordon, or with the sweet yesterday’s tale of Zutphen, where their country’s dearest gave his cup of water to a dying comrade. A decade later, before their handsome, bluff father, her other healthful boys stood up to wrestle, and twang their arrows at forty paces ; or a rosy daughter stole to his side, and asked him of Spenser’s mishaps in Ireland, or of the giant laughter bubbling from the “ oracle of Apollo ” in a London street. It is to be believed that one who watched events through Raleigh’s dramatic trial, reprieve, and execution, through the amusing Spanish tour of the Prince of Wales, the fever for colonization, the savage sea-fights, the religious divisions, the muttering parliamentary thunders, the national stress and heat of the exciting dawn of the seventeenth century, was not unmindful of all it meant to be alive, there and then. Magdalen Newport’s girlhood fell on Lyly’s Euphues, fresh from the printers; the Arcadia made the talk of Oxford in her prime ; the dusky splendor of Marlowe’s Faustus was abroad before her second marriage. She was, surely, aware of Shakespeare, and of the wonder-folio of 1623; of the newest delighting madrigals and antiphons ; of rascal Robert Greene’s lovable lyrics, and Wyatt’s, and heart-whole Drayton’s. She wrote no verses, indeed, but her familiars wrote them ; her every step jostled a Muse. We may assume that no growth nor decay in literary circles escaped that tender, “ perplexing eye.” Perhaps it glistened from a bench, in the pioneer theatre of England, on the actors of Volpone ; or followed silently, behind the royal group, the first mincings of the first dear Fool in King Lear, one day-after-Christmas at Whitehall. Last of all, for whim’s sake, how one would enjoy having the central opinion of young Lady Herbert, or that of little Mistress Donne, concerning the woman they could not but thank and praise! O viveret Pepys ! It is a cheat of history that it preserves no clearer tint or trace of this chosen passef-by. Such, indeed, she was, and the quiet vanishing name clings to her : the woman of durable gladness, happily born and taught, like the soul of whom Sir Henry Wotton (whom she must have known !) made his immortal song.

In the parish church of Chelsea, on June 8, 1627, she was buried.

the final earthly glimpse of her still traditional, still beautiful. On the 1st of July, her beloved liegeman, now Dean of St. Paul’s, preached her funeral sermon there, before a vast throng of the great ones of London, the clergy, and the poor. Izaak Walton’s kind face looked up from a near pew, whence he saw Dr. Donne’s tears and felt his breaking voice. The sermon to which he listened was printed in duodecimo, “ together with other Commemorations of Her, by her Sonne G. Herbert,”and offered to the public at the Golden Lion in Paul’s Churchyard, the same year. It is only the latter part, the postlude, which, without turning from the consideration of its not very adequate scriptural text, deals with the worth of the dead. The mouth of her friend did not belie her, nigh the end of his own pilgrimage. In present grief and among graver memories, he had the true perception not to forget how joyous the other had been. “ She died,” he said, “ without any change of countenance or posture, without any struggling, any disorder, . . . and expected that which she hath received: God’s physic and God’s music, a Christianly death. . . . She was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame, . . . naturally cheerful and merry, and loving facetiousness and sharpness of wit.”His own fund of mirth and strength was fast going. Morbid and persistent thoughts beset him from this hour, probably, more than ever, until he had the effigy of himself, painted as he was, laid in sight of his failing eyes,— morbid and persistent thoughts of the ruin which befalls the bright bodies of humanity, sometimes surging up in his lonelier moods, and crowding out the better vision which yet may “ grace us in the disgrace of death.” His inward eye was drawn strongly to his friend’s sepulchre, sealed and sombre before him, and to what had been her, “ going into dust now almost a month of days, almost a lunar year ; which, while I speak, is mouldering and crumbling into less and less dust.” But he ended in a wholesomer eloquence, subdued and calm: “This good soul being thus laid down to sleep in his peace, ' I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, that ye wake her not! ’ ”

The rare little volume which contains the sermon has also a number of Greek and Latin verses, Memoriæ Matris Sacrum, from the filial pen. Strangely enough, nowhere is the sweet and sage poet of The Temple so stiff, so strained, so given to awkward conceits, so out of tune with the austere ideals of classic diction. But inasmuch as George Herbert loved his mother (a fact discoverable with difficulty from the impersonal idiom of the Parentalia), there intrudes on his scholar’s gait the natural faltering, the sudden pathos of attitude, as he recalls her twofold felicity of life,

Of the gracious figure of Sir John Danvers we lose sight. Dr. Donne, we know, died in 1631, whatever was yet of earth in his spirit healed and chastened by long pain. His last remembrance to his friends was his own seal of Christ on the Anchor, " engraven very small on heliotropium stones, and set in gold, for rings.” Many of those to whom his heart turned, the “ autumnal beauty ” scarce second among them, had preceded him out of England. But in traveling toward his Maker, he had the other sacred hope to “ ebb on with them.” and gloriously overtake them, as he traced the epitaph which covers him in St. Paul’s: “Hic licet in occiduo cinere ; aspicit eum cujus nomen est Oriens.”

Louise Imogen Guiney.