John Donne and The Resurrection; Anne Hyde and Her Conversion

Last year, I posted on the death of John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's, poet, pamphleter, Anglican preacher and former Catholic: Find that post here. For Easter Sunday this year, here is his Resurrection poem from the Holy Sonnets:

Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shall--though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly--be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.

More on Donne here.

March 31 is also the anniversary of Anne Hyde's death in 1671--the Duchess of York, mother of two queens, Mary II and Anne, she had become Catholic (secretly) soon after the Restoration in 1660. Her conversion to Catholicism influenced her husband, James, the Duke of York and later King James II and VII, to become a Catholic himself. The great compendium of English Catholic spiritual writing, Firmly I Believe and Truly, contains this account of her conversion!