John Donne

Of all Donne's poems these are the most difficult to date with any definiteness. Jonson, Drummond notes, 'affirmeth Done to have written all his best pieces ere he was twenty-five years old,' that would be before 1598, the year in which Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton. This harmonizes fairly well with such indications of date as are discoverable in the Elegies, poems similar in theme and tone to the Songs and Sonets. Mr. Chambers pushes the more daring and cynical of these poems in both these groups further back. He says, 'All Donne's Love-poems ... seem to me to fall into two divisions. There is one, marked by cynicism, ethical laxity and a somewhat deliberate profession of inconstancy. This I believe to be his earliest style, and ascribe the poems marked by it to the period before 1596. About that date he became acquainted with Anne More, whom he evidently loved devotedly and sincerely ever after. And therefore from 1596 onwards I place the second division, with its emphasis of the spiritual, and deep insight into the real things of love.' This is a little too early. Anne More was only twelve years old in 1596, and it is unlikely that she and Donne were known to each other before 1598. Their affection probably ripened later. It almost seems from Donne's letters to his friends as though about 1599 he was proffering at least courtly adoration to some other lady.

Moreover, it is to conceive somewhat inadequately of Donne's complex nature to make too sharp a temporal division between his gayer, more cynical effusions and his graver, even religious pieces. The truth about Donne is well stated by Professor Norton: 'Donne's "better angel" and his "worser spirit" seem to have kept up a continual contest, now the one, now the other, gaining the mastery in his

Poor soul, the centre of his sinful earth.'

The 'evaporations' which he allowed his wit from time to time till he took orders showed always a certain 'ethical laxity' and 'cynicism' of outlook on men and women. The Elegie XIV (if it be Donne's, and Mr. Chambers does not question its authenticity), the lines Upon Mr. Thomas Coryats Crudities, the two frankly pagan Epithalamia on the Princess Elizabeth and the Countess of Somerset, to say nothing of Ignatius his Conclave, were all written long after his marriage and when he was already the author of moral epistles and 'divine poems'. Even Professor Norton's statement exaggerates the 'contest' a little. These things were evaporations of wit, and even a serious man in the seventeenth century allowed to his wit satyric gambols which disconcert our staider and more fastidious taste. I am quite at one with Mr. Chambers in accepting his marriage as a turning-point in the history of Donne's life and mind. But it would be rash to affirm that none of his wittier lyrics were written after this date.

Donne's 'songs and sonets' seem to me to fall into three rather than two classes, though there is a good deal of overlapping. Donne's wit is always touched with passion; his passion is always witty. In the first class I would place those which are frankly 'evaporations' of more or less cynical wit, the poems in which he parades his own inconstancy or enlarges on the weaknesses of women, poems such as 'Goe and catche', Womans constancy, The Indifferent, Loves Vsury, The Legacie, Communitie, Confined Love, Loves Alchymie, The Flea, The Message, Witchcraft by a picture, The Apparition, Loves Deitie, Loves diet, The Will, A Jeat Ring sent, Negative love, Farewell to love. In another group the wit in Donne, whether gaily or passionately cynical, is subordinate to the lover, pure and simple, singing, at times with amazing simplicity and intensity of feeling, the joys of love and the sorrow of parting. Such are The good-morrow, The Sunne Rising, The Canonization, Lovers infiniteness, 'Sweetest love, I do not goe,' A Feaver, Aire and Angells (touched with cynical humour at the close), Breake of day, The Anniversarie, A Valediction: of the booke, Loves growth, The Dreame, A Valediction: of weeping, The Baite, A Valediction: forbidding mourning, The Extasie, The Prohibition, The Expiration, Lecture upon the Shadow. It would, of course, be rash to say that all such poems were addressed to his wife. Some, like The Baite, are purely literary in origin; others present the obverse side of the passion portrayed in the first group, its happier moments. But one must believe that those in which ardour is combined with elevation and delicacy of feeling were addressed to Anne More before and after their marriage.

In the third and smallest group, which includes, however, such fine examples of his subtler moods as The Funerall, The Blossome, The Primrose, Donne adopts the tone (as sincerely as was generally the case) of the Petrarchian lover whose mistress's coldness has slain him or provokes his passionate protestations. Some of these must, I think, have been written after Donne's marriage. The titles one or two bear connect them with Mrs. Herbert and the Countess of Bedford. The two most enigmatical poems in the Songs and Sonets are Twicknam Garden and A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day. Yet the very names 'Twicknam Garden' and 'S. Lucies day' suggest a reference to the Countess of Bedford. It is possible that the last was written when Lady Bedford was ill in December, 1612? 'My Lady Bedford last night about one of the clock was suddenly, and has continued ever since, speechless, and is past all hopes though yet alive,' writes the Earl of Dorset on November 23, 1612. It is probable that on December 13 she was still in a critical condition, supposing the illness to have been that common complaint of an age of bad drains, namely typhoid fever, and Donne may have written in anticipation of her death. But the suggestion is hazardous. The third verse speaks a stronger language than that of Petrarchian adoration. Still it is difficult for us to estimate aright all that was allowed to a 'servant' under the accepted convention. It is noteworthy that the poem is not included in any known MS. collection made before 1630. The Countess died in 1627.

Page 7. The Good-morrow.

The MSS. point to two distinct recensions of this poem. The one which is given in the group of MSS. D, H49, Lec, and in 1633, reads, 3. countrey pleasures childishly 4. snorted 14. one world 17. better. The other, which is the most common in the MSS., reads, 3. childish pleasures seelily 4. slumbred 14. our world 17. fitter. The edition of 1635 shows a contamination of the two due to the fact that the printer 'set up' from 1633, and he or the editor corrected from a MS. collection, probably A18, N, TC. In TCD the second recension is given in the collection of Donne's poems in the first part of the MS.; in the second part, a miscellaneous collection of poems, the poem is given again, but according to the other version. It does not seem to me possible to decide absolutely the relative authority of the two versions, but to my mind that of 1633 and D, H49, Lec seems the more racy and characteristic. It probably represents the first version of the poem, whether Donne or another be responsible for the alterations. The only point of importance to be decided is whether 'better' or 'fitter' expresses more exactly what the poet meant to say. The 1635 editor preferred 'fitter', thinking probably that the idea of exact correspondence is emphasized, 'where find two hemispheres that fit one another more exactly?' But this is not, I think, what Donne meant. The mutual fittingness of the lovers is implied already in the idea that each is a whole world to the other. Gazing in each other's eyes each beholds a hemisphere of this world. The whole cannot, of course, be reflected. And where could either find a better hemisphere, one in which there is as here neither 'sharpe North' nor 'declining West', neither coldness nor alteration.

l. 13. Let Maps to other. The edition may have dropped the 's', which occurs in most of the MSS., but the plural without 's' is common even till a later period: 'These, as his other, were naughty things.' Bunyan, The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, p. 106 (Cambridge English Classics). 'And other of such vinegar aspect That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile.' Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, I. i. 54.

ll. 20-1. If our two loves be one, &c. If our two loves are one, dissolution is impossible; and the same is true if, though two, they are always alike. What is simple—as God or the soul—cannot be dissolved; nor compounds, e.g. the Heavenly bodies, between whose elements there is no contrariety. 'Impossibile autem est quod forma separetur a se ipsa. Unde impossibile est, quod forma subsistens desinat esse. Dato etiam, quod anima esset ex materia et forma composita, ut quidam dicunt, adhuc oporteret ponere eam incorruptibilem. Non enim invenitur corruptio nisi ubi invenitur contrarietas; generationes enim et corruptiones ex contrariis et in contraria sunt' &c., Aquinas, Summa I. Quaest. lxxv, Art. 6. The body, being composed of contrary elements, has not this essential immortality: 'In Heaven we doe not say, that our bodies shall devest their mortality, so, as that naturally they could not dye; for they shall have a composition still; and every compounded thing may perish; but they shall be so assured, and with such a preservation, as they shall alwaies know they shall never dye.' Sermons 80. 19. 189.

Page 8. Song.

The first two stanzas of this song are printed in the 1653 edition of the Poems of Francis Beaumont, with the title A Raritie. It is set to music in Eg. MS. 2013, f. 58. Mr. Chambers points out that Habington's poem, Against them who lay Unchastity to the Sex of Women (Castara, ed. Elton, p. 231), evidently refers to this poem:

They meet but with unwholesome springs

And summers which infectious are:

They hear but when the meremaid sings,

And only see the falling starre:

Who ever dare

Affirme no woman chaste and faire.

Goe cure your feavers; and you'le say

The Dog-dayes scorch not all the yeare:

In copper mines no longer stay,

But travel to the west, and there

The right ones see,

And grant all gold's not alchimie.

A poem modelled on Donne's appears in Harleian MS. 6057, and in The Treasury of Music. By Mr. Lawes and others. (1669)

Goe catch a star that's falling from the sky,

Cause an immortal creature for to die;

Stop with thy hand the current of the seas,

Post ore the earth to the Antipodes;

Cause times return and call back yesterday,

Cloake January with the month of May;

Weigh out an ounce of flame, blow back the winde:

And then find faith within a womans minde.

John Dunne.

l. 2. Get with child a mandrake root. 'Many Mola's and false conceptions there are of Mandrakes, the first from great Antiquity, conceiveth the Root thereof resembleth the shape of Man.... Now whatever encourageth the first invention, there have not been wanting many ways of its promotion. The first a Catachrestical and far derived similitude it holds with Man; that is, in a bifurcation or division of the Root into two parts, which some are content to call Thighs.' Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors (1686), ii. 6, p. 72. Compare also The Progresse of the Soule, st. xv, p. 300.

Page 10. The Undertaking.

l. 2. the Worthies. The nine worthies usually named are Joshua, David, Judas Maccabaeus, Hector, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bouillon, but they varied. Guy of Warwick is mentioned by Gerard Legh, Accedens of Armorye. Nash mentions Solomon and Gideon; and Shakespeare introduces Hercules and Pompey in Love's Labour's Lost. All the Worthies therefore covers a wide field. The Worthies figured largely in decorative designs and pageants. On a target taken at the siege of Ostend 'was enammeled in gold the seven [sic] Worthies, worth seven or eight hundred guilders'. Vere's Commentaries (1657), p. 174.

l. 6. The skill of specular stone. Compare To the Countesse of Bedford, p. 219, ll. 28-30:

You teach (though wee learne not) a thing unknowne

To our late times, the use of specular stone,

Through which all things within without were shown.

Grosart (ii. 48-9) and Professor Norton (Grolier, i. 217) take 'specular' as meaning simply 'translucent', and the latter quotes Holinshed's Chronicle, ii. ch. 10: 'I find obscure mention of the specular stone also to have been found and applied to this use' (i.e. glazing windows) 'in England, but in such doubtful sort as I dare not affirm for certain.' This is the 'pierre spÉculaire' or 'pierre À miroir' which Cotgrave describes as 'A light, white, and transparent stone, easily cleft into thinne flakes, and used by th' Arabians (among whom it growes) instead of glasse; anight it represents the Moon, and even increases or decreases, as the Moon doth'. But surely Donne refers to crystal-gazing. Paracelsus has a paragraph in the Coelum Philosophorum:

'How to conjure the Crystal so that all Things may

be seen in it.

'To conjure is nothing else than to observe anything rightly, to know and to understand what it is. The crystal is a figure of the air. Whatever appears in the air, movable or immovable, the same appears also in the speculum or crystal as a wave. For the air, the water, and the crystal, so far as vision is concerned, are one, like a mirror in which an inverted copy of an object is seen.' The old name for crystal-gazers was 'specularii'. Mr. Chambers suggests very probably that there is a reference to Dr. Dee's magic mirrors or 'show stone', but one would like to explain the reference to the cutting of the stone on the one hand, and its being no longer to be found on the other.

l. 16. Loves but their oldest clothes. The 'her' of B is a tempting reading in view of the 'woman' which follows, but 'their' is the common version and the poet's mind passes rapidly to and fro between the abstract and its concrete embodiments. The proleptic use of the pronoun is striking in either case.

Compare To Mrs. M. H., p. 217, ll. 31-2.

l. 18. Vertue attir'd in woman see. The reading of the 1633 edition, which is that of the best manuscripts, has more of Donne's characteristic hyperbole than the metrically more regular 'Vertue in woman see'. 'If you can see the Idea of Vertue attired in the visible form of woman and love that.'

Page 11. The Sunne Rising.

Compare Ovid, Amores, I. 13.

Iam super oceanum venit a seniore marito,

Flava pruinoso quae vehit axe diem.

Quo properas, Aurora?

...

Quo properas, ingrata viris, ingrata puellis?

...

Tu pueros somno fraudas, tradisque magistris,

Ut subeant tenerae verbera saeva manus.

A comparison of Ovid's simple and natural images and reflections with Donne's passionate but ingenious hyperboles will show exactly what Testi meant by his contrast of the homely imagery of classical and the metaphysical manner of Italian love poetry.

l. 17. both th' India's of spice and Myne. A distinction that Donne is never tired of. 'The use of the word mine specifically for mines of gold, silver, or precious stone is, I believe, peculiar to Donne.' Coleridge, quoted by Norton. The O.E.D. does not contradict this, for the word had a wider connotation. Compare Loves exchange, p. 35, ll. 34-35:

and make more

Mynes in the earth, then Quarries were before.

And The Progresse of the Soule, p. 295, l. 17:

thy Western land of Myne.

And for the two Indias: 'As hee that hath a plentifull fortune in Europe, cares not much though there be no land of perfumes in the East, nor of gold, in the West-Indies.' Sermons 50. 15. 123. And 'Sir. Your way into Spain was eastward, and that is the way to the land of perfumes and spices; their way hither is westward, and that is the way to the land of gold and of mines,' &c. To Sir Robert Ker. Gosse's Life, &c., ii. 191.

l. 24. All wealth alchimie: i.e. imposture or 'glittering dross' (O.E.D.). 'Though the show of it were glorious, the substance of it was dross, and nothing but alchymy and cozenage.' Harrington, Orlando Furioso (1591). See also poem cited II. p. 11.

Page 12. The Indifferent.

l. 7. dry corke. Cork was a favourite metaphor for what was dry and withered. To our taste it is hardly congruous with love or tragic poetry, perhaps because of its associations. 'Bind fast his corky arms,' says Cornwall, speaking of Gloucester (King Lear, III. vii. 31), but Shakespeare seems to have taken the epithet from Harsnett's Declaration of Egregious Popishe Impostures, &c. (1603): 'It would pose all the cunning exorcists ... to teach an old corkie woman to writhe, tumble, curvet,' c. 5, p. 23.

Page 13. Loves Usury.

l. 5. My body raigne. Grosart and Chambers substitute 'range', from 1635-69. Perhaps they are right; but I feel doubtful. All the best MSS. read 'raigne.' Donne contrasts the reign of love and the reign of lust on the body, and frankly declares for the latter. A lover might range, 'I can love both fair and brown,' but no lover could

mistake by the way

The maid, and tell the lady of that delay.

Adonis, with graver rhetoric, states the other side of Donne's paradoxical thesis:

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,

Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;

Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;

Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies.

Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, v. cxxxiv.

ll. 13-16. Chambers and Grosart have adopted, with some modification of punctuation, the reading of the 1633-54 editions, and the lines are frequently quoted as printed by Chambers:

Only let me love none; no, not the sport

From country-grass to confitures of court,

Or city's quelque-choses; let not report

My mind transport.

I confess I find it difficult to attach any exact meaning to them. Are there any instances of 'sport' thus used apparently for 'sportive lady'? The difficulty seems to me to have arisen from the accidental dropping in the 1633 edition of the semicolon after 'sport', which the 1669 editor rightly restored. What Donne means by 'the sport' is clear enough from other passages, e.g. 'the short scorn of a bridegroom's play' (Loves Alchimie), 'as she would man should despise the sport' (Farewell to Love). The prayer that report may ('let', not 'let not') carry his roving fancy from one to another, is in keeping with the whole tenor of the poem. The Grolier Club edition has the punctuation I have given, which I had adopted before I saw that edition. I find it difficult to attach any meaning to 'let not report'.

Page 14. The Canonization.

l. 7. Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face Contemplate. Donne's conceits reappear in his sermons in a different setting. 'Beloved in Christ Jesus, the heart of your gracious God is set upon you; and we his servants have told you so, and brought you thus neare him, into his Court, into his house, into the Church, but yet we cannot get you to see his face, to come to that tendernesse of conscience as to remember and consider that all your most secret actions are done in his sight and his presence; Caesars face, and Caesars inscription you can see: The face of the Prince in his coyne you can rise before the Sun to see, and sit up till mid-night to see; but if you do not see the face of God upon every piece of that mony too, all that mony is counterfeit; If Christ have not brought that fish to the hook, that brings the mony in the mouth (as he did to Peter) that mony is ill fished for.' Sermons 80. 12. 122.

l. 15. 'Man' is the reading of every MS. except Lec, which here as in several other little details appears to resemble 1633 more closely than either of the other MSS., D, H49. It is quite possible that 'man' is correct—a vivid and concrete touch, but in view of the 'men' which follows 'more' is preferable. The two words are frequently interchanged in the MSS.

ll. 24-5. The punctuation of these lines is that of D, H49, Lec, though I adopted it independently as required by the sense. The editions put a full stop after each line. Chambers alters the first (l. 24) to a semicolon and connects

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

with the two preceding lines. To me it seems the line must go with what follows, and that 'so' (which should have no comma) is not an illative conjunction but a subordinate conjunction of effect. 'Both sexes fit so entirely into one neutral thing that we die and rise the same,' &c. The Grolier Club editor, like Chambers, connects the line with what has gone before, but drops the comma after 'so', making it an adverb of degree.

ll. 37-45. And thus invoke us, &c. Grosart and Chambers have disguised and altered the sense of this stanza. Grosart, indeed, by printing 'Who did the whole world's extract', has made it completely unintelligible. Chambers's version gives a meaning, but a wrong one. He prints the last six lines thus:

Who did the whole worlds soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes;

So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize—

Countries, towns, courts beg from above

A pattern of your love.

These harsh constructions are not Donne's. The object of 'drove' is not the 'world's soul', but 'Countries, towns, courts'; and 'beg' is not in the indicative but the imperative mood. For clearness' sake I have bracketed ll. 42-3 and printed 'love!' otherwise leaving the punctuation unchanged.

Donne as usual is pedantically accurate in the details of his metaphor. The canonized lovers are invoked as saints, i.e. their prayers are requested. They are asked to beg from above a pattern of their love for those below. Of prayers to saints Donne speaks in one of his Letters, p. 181: 'I see not how I can admit that circuit of sending them' (i.e. letters) 'to you to be sent hither; that seems a kinde of praying to Saints, to whom God must tell first, that such a man prays to them to pray to him.'

l. 40. The 'contract' of the printed editions is doubtless correct, despite the preference of the MSS. for 'extract'. This goes in several MSS. with other errors which show confusion. D, H49, Lec read 'and drawe', a bad rhyme; and A18, N, TCC (the verse is lost in TCD) drop 'soule', reading 'the world extract'. The reading 'extract' is due to what Dr. Moore calls 'the extraordinary short-sightedness of the copyists in respect of a construction. Their vision seems often to be bounded by a single line.' To 'extract the soul' of things is a not uncommon phrase with Donne. Here it does not suit the thought which is coming so well as 'contract': 'As the spirit and soule of the whole booke of Psalmes is contracted into this psalme, so is the spirit and soule of this whole psalme contracted into this verse.' Sermons 80. 66. 663. (Psal. lxiii. 7. Because thou hast beene my helpe, Therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.)

l. 45. A patterne of your love. The 'of our love' of 1633 might mean 'for our love', but it is clear from the manner in which this stanza is given in D that the copyist has misunderstood the construction—'our love' follows from the assumption that 'Countries, Townes, Courts' is the subject to 'Beg'. The colon and the capital letter would not make such a view impossible, as they might be given a merely emphasizing value; or if regarded as imperative the 'Beg' might be taken as in the third person: 'Countries, Townes, Courts—let them beg,' &c. Compare:

The God of Souldiers:

With the consent of supreame Jove, informe

Thy thoughts with Noblenesse.

Shakespeare, Cor. v. iii. 70-2

(Simpson, Shakespearian Punctuation, p. 98).

But clearly here 'Beg' is in the second person plural, predicate to 'You whom reverend love', and 'your love' is the right reading.

Page 16. The Triple Foole.

He is trebly a fool because (1) he loves, (2) he expresses his love in verse, (3) he thereby enables some one to set the verse to music and by singing it to re-awaken the passion which composition had lulled to sleep.

Page 17. Lovers Infiniteness.

This song, which is one of the obviously authentic lyrics which is not included in the A18, N, TC collection, would seem to have undergone some revision after its first issue. The version given in A25, from which Cy is copied, would seem to be the original, at least the readings of ll. 25-6 and ll. 29-30 do not look like corruptions. The reading 'beget' at l. 25 gives a better rhyme to 'yet' than 'admit'. In l. 29 A25 has obviously interchanged 'thine' and 'mine'. The slightly different version of JC gives the correct order. The generally careful D, H49, Lec group has an unusually faulty text of this poem. Among other mistakes it reads (with S96) 'Thee' for 'them' in l. 32.

'Lovers Infiniteness' is a strange title. It is not found in any of the MSS., and possibly should be 'Loves Infiniteness'. Yet the 'Lovers' suits the closing thought:

so we shall

Be one, and one anothers All.

For a poem in obvious imitation of this, see Appendix C, p. 439.

ll. 1-11. The rhetoric and rhythm of Donne's elaborate stanzas depends a good deal on their right punctuation. Mine is an attempt to correct that of 1633 without modernizing. The full stop after 'fall' is obviously an error, and so is, I think, the comma after 'spent'. The first six lines state in a rapid succession of clauses all that the poet has done to gain his lady's love. A new thought begins with 'Yet no more', &c.

l. 9. generall is the reading of two MSS. which are practically one. I have recorded it because (1) ll. 29-30 (see textual note) would seem to suggest that their version of the poem is an early one (revised by Donne), and this may be an early reading; (2) because in l. 20 this epithet is used as though repeated, 'thy gift being generall.' It would be not unlike Donne to quibble with the word, making it mean first a gift made generally to all, and secondly a gift general in its content, not limited or defined in any way. The whole poem is a piece of legal quibbling not unlike Shakespeare's 87th Sonnet:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:

The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;

My bonds in thee are all determinate, &c.

Page 18. Song.

Sweetest love, &c. Of the music to this and 'Send home my long stray'd eyes' I can discover no trace. The Baite was doubtless sung to the same air as Marlowe's 'Come live with me'. See II. p. 57.

ll. 6-8. I have retained the text of 1633, which has the support of all the MSS. That of 1635-54 is an attempt to accommodate the lines, by a little padding, to the rhythm of the corresponding lines in the other stanzas.

Page 20. The Legacie.

ll. 9-16. I heard me say, &c. The construction of this verse has proved rather a difficulty to editors. I give it as printed by Chambers and by the Grolier Club editor. Chambers's modernized version runs:

I heard me say, 'Tell her anon,

That myself', that is you not I,

'Did kill me', and when I felt me die,

I bid me send my heart, when I was gone;

But I alas! could there find none;

When I had ripp'd and search'd where hearts should lie,

It killed me again, that I who still was true

In life, in my last will should cozen you.

The Grolier Club version has no inverted commas, and runs:

I heard me say, Tell her anon,

That myself, that's you not I,

Did kill me; and when I felt me die,

I bid me send my heart, when I was gone;

But I alas! could there find none.

When I had ripped me and searched where hearts did lie,

It killed me again that I, who still was true

In life, in my last will should cozen you.

In my own version the only departure which I have made from the punctuation of the 1633 version is the substitution of a semicolon for a comma after 'lye' (l. 14). If inverted commas are to be used at all it seems to me they would need to be extended to 'gone' (l. 12) or to 'lie' (l. 14). As Donne is addressing the lady throughout it is difficult to distinguish what he says to her now from what he said on the occasion imagined.

But the point in which both Chambers and the Grolier Club editor seem to me in error is in connecting l. 14, When I had ripp'd, &c., with what follows instead of with the immediately preceding line. There is no justification for changing the comma after 'none' either to a semicolon or a full stop. The meaning of ll. 13-14 is, 'But alas! when I had ripp'd me and search'd where hearts did (i.e. used to) lie, I could there find none.' It is so that the Dutch translator understands the lines:

Maer, oh, ick vond er geen, al scheurd ick mijn geraemt,

En socht door d'oude plaets die 't Hert is toegeraemt.

The last two lines are a comment on the whole incident, the making of the will and the poet's inability to implement it.

l. 20. It was intire to none: i.e. 'It was tied to no one lover.' The word 'entire' in this sense is still found on public-house signs, and misled the American Pinkerton in Stevenson's The Wrecker. Compare: 'But this evening I will spie upon the B[ishop] and give you an account to-morrow morning of his disposition; when, if he cannot be intire to you, since you are gone so farre downwards in your favours to me, be pleased to pursue your humiliation so farre as to chuse your day, and either to suffer the solitude of this place, or to change it, by such company, as shall waite upon you.' Letters, p. 315 (To ... Sir Robert Karre). This seems to mean, 'if the Bishop cannot fulfill, be faithful to, his engagement to you, come and dine here.'

ll. 21-24. These lines are also printed or punctuated in a misleading fashion by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor. The former, following 1669, but altering the punctuation, prints:

As good as could be made by art

It seemed, and therefore for our loss be sad.

I meant to send that heart instead of mine,

But O! no man could hold it, for 'twas thine.

The 'for our loss be sad' comes in very strangely before the end, nor is the force of 'and therefore' very clear.

The Grolier Club editor, following the words of 1633, but altering the punctuation, reads:

As good as could be made by art

It seemed, and therefore for our losses sad;

I meant to send this heart instead of mine

But oh! no man could hold it, for twas thine.

Apparently the heart was sad for our losses because it was no better than might be made by art. The confusion arises from deserting the punctuation of 1633. 'For our losses sad' is an adjectival qualification of 'I'. 'I, sad to have lost my heart, which by legacy was yours, resolved as a pis aller to send this, which seemed as good as could be made by art. But to send it was impossible, for no man could hold it. It was thine.'

Huyghens translates:

Soo meenden ick 't verlies dat ick vergelden most

Te boeten met dit Hert, en doen 't u toebehooren:

Maer, oh, 't en kost niet zijn, 't was uw al lang te voren.

But this does not appear to be quite accurate. Huyghens appears to think that Donne could not give his heart to the lady, because it was hers already. What he really says is, that no one could keep this heart of hers, which had taken the place of his own in his bosom, because, being hers, it was too volatile.

Page 21. A Feaver.

ll. 13-14.

O wrangling schooles, that search what fire

Shall burne this world.

'I cannot but marvel from what Sibyl or Oracle they' (the Ancients) 'stole the prophecy of the world's destruction by fire, or whence Lucan learned to say,

Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra

Misturus.

There yet remaines to th'World one common fire

Wherein our Bones with Stars shall make one pyre.

I believe the World grows near its end, yet is neither old nor decayed, nor will ever perish upon the ruines of its own Principles. As the work of Creation was above nature, so is its adversary annihilation; without which the World hath not its end, but its mutation. Now what force should be able to consume it thus far, without the breath of God, which is the truest consuming flame, my Philosophy cannot inform me.' Browne's Religio Medici, sect. 45.

Page 22. Aire and Angels.

l. 19. Ev'ry thy haire. This, the reading of 1633-39 and the MSS., is, I think, preferable to the amended 'Thy every hair', &c., of the 1650-69 editions (which Chambers adopts, ascribing it to 1669 alone), though the difference is slight. 'Every thy hair' has the force of 'Thy every hair' with the additional suggestion of 'even thy least hair' derived from the construction with a superlative adjective. 'Every the least remembrance.' J. King, Sermons 28. 'Every, the most complex, web of thought may be reduced to simple syllogisms.' Sir W. Hamilton. See note to The Funerall, l. 3.

ll. 23-4. Then as an Angell face and wings

Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure doth weare.

St. Thomas (Summa Theol. I. li. 2) discusses the nature of the body assumed by Angels when they appear to men, seeing that naturally they are incorporeal. There being four elements, this body must consist of one of these, but 'Angeli non assumunt corpora de terr vel aquÂ: quia non subito disparerent. Neque iterum de igne: quia comburerent ea quae contingerent. Neque iterum ex aere: quia aer infigurabilis est et incolorabilis'. To this Aquinas replies, 'Quod licet aer in sua raritate manens non retineat figuram neque colorem: quando tamen condensatur, et figurari et colorari potest: sicut patet in nubibus. Et sic Angeli assumunt corpora ex aere, condensando ipsum virtute divina, quantum necesse est ad corporis assumendi formationem.'

Tasso, familiar like Donne with Catholic doctrine, thus clothes his angels:

CosÌ parlÒgli, e Gabriel s' accinse

Veloce ad eseguir l' imposte cose.

La sua forma invisibil d'aria cinse,

Ed al senso mortal la sottopose:

Umane membra, aspetto uman si finse,

Ma di celeste maestÀ il compose.

Tra giovane e fanciullo etÀ confine

Gerus. Lib. I. 13.Prese, ed ornÒ di raggi il biondo crine.

Fairfax translates the relevant lines:

In form of airy members fair imbared,

His spirits pure were subject to our sight.

Milton's language is vague and inconsistent, but his angels are indubitably corporeal. When Satan is wounded,

the ethereal substance closed,

Not long divisible; and from the gash

A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed

Sanguine, such as celestial Spirits may bleed.

.... ... ...

Yet soon he healed; for Spirits that live throughout

Vital in every part, (not as frail man

In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,)

Cannot but by annihilating die;

Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound

Receive, no more than can the fluid air.

All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,

All intellect, all sense; and as they please,

They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size

Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

The lines italicized indicate that Milton is familiar with the doctrine of the schools, and is giving it a turn of his own. Milton's angels, apparently, do not assume a body of air but, remaining in their own ethereal substance, assume what form and colour they choose. Raphael, thus having passed through the air like a bird,

to his proper shape returns

A Seraph winged, &c.

Nash says, speaking of Satan, 'Lucifer (before his fall) an Archangel, was a cleere body, compact of the purest and brightest of the ayre, but after his fall hee was vayled with a grosser substance, and tooke a new forme of darke and thicke ayre, which he still reteyneth.' Pierce Penniless (Grosart), ii. 102. The popular mind had difficulty in appreciating the scholastic doctrine of the purely spiritual nature of angels who do not possess but only assume bodies; who do not occupy any point in space but are virtually present as operating at that point. 'Per applicationem igitur virtutis angelicae ad aliquem locum qualitercumque dicitur Angelus esse in loco corporeo.' The popular mind gave them thin bodies and wondered how many could stand on a needle.

The Scholastic doctrine of Angelic bodies was an inheritance from the Neo-Platonic doctrine of the bodies of demons, the beings intermediary between gods and men. According to Plotinus these could assume a body of air or of fire, but the generally entertained view of the school was, that their bodies were of air. Apuleius was the author of a definition of demons which was transmitted through the Middle Ages: 'Daemones sunt genere animalia, ingenio rationalia, animo passiva, corpore aeria, tempore aeterna.' See also Dante, Purgatorio, xv. The aerial or aetherial body is a tenet of mysticism. It has been defended by such different thinkers as Leibnitz and Charles Bonnet. See Bouillet's note to Plotinus's Enneads, I. 454.

Page 23. Breake of day.

This poem is obviously addressed by a woman to her lover, not vice versa, though the fact has eluded some of the copyists, who have tried to change the pronouns. It is strange to find the subtle and erudite Donne in his quest of realism falling into line with the popular song-writer. Mr. Chambers has pointed out in his learned and delightful essay on the mediaeval lyric (Early English Lyrics, 1907) that the popular as opposed to the courtly love-song was frequently put into the mouth of the woman. One has only to turn to Burns and the Scotch lyrists to find the same thing true. This song, indeed, is clearly descended from the popular aube, or lyric dialogue of lovers parting at daybreak. The dialogue suggestion is heightened by the punctuation of l. 3 in some MSS.

Why should we rise? Because 'tis light?

ll. 13-18. Must businesse thee from hence remove, &c. 'It is a good definition of ill-love, that St. Chrysostom gives, that it is Animae vacantis passio, a passion of an empty soul, of an idle mind. For fill a man with business, and he hath no room for such love.' Sermons 26. 384.

Page 24. The Anniversarie.

l. 3. The Sun itselfe, which makes times, as they passe: i.e. which makes times and seasons as they pass.

Before the Sunne, the which fram'd daies, was fram'd.

The Second Anniversary, l. 23.

The construction is somewhat of an anacoluthon, the sun alone being given the predicate, 'Is elder by a year,' which has to be supplied with all the other subjects in the first two lines. Chambers, inadvertently or from some copy of 1633, reads 'time', and this makes 'they' refer back to 'Kings, favourites', &c. This does not improve the construction.

l. 22. But wee no more, then all the rest. The 'wee' of every MS. which I have consulted seems to me certainly the correct reading. The 'now' of all the printed editions is due to the editor of 1633 imagining that he got thereby the right antithesis to 'then'. But he was too hasty, for the antithesis is between 'then' when we are in heaven, and now while we are 'here upon earth'. In heaven indeed we shall be 'throughly blest', but all in heaven are equally happy, whereas here on earth,

we'are kings and none but we

Can be such kings, nor of such subjects be.

The 'none but we' is the extreme antithesis to 'But we no more than all the rest'.

The Scholastic Philosophy held, not indeed that all in heaven are equally blest, but that all are equally content. Basing themselves on the verse, 'In domo Patris mei mansiones multae sunt,' John xiv. 2, they argued that the blessed have in varying degree according to their merit, the essential happiness of Heaven which is the vision of God:

Only who have enjoy'd

The sight of God, in fulnesse, can think it;

For it is both the object and the wit.

This is essential joy, where neither hee

Can suffer diminution, nor wee;

'Tis such a full, and such a filling good;

Had th'Angells once look'd on him they had stood.

The Second Anniversary, ll. 440-6 (p. 264).

But though not all equally dowered with the virtue and the wisdom to understand God, all are content, for each is full to his measure, and each is happy in the happiness of the other: 'Solet etiam quaeri an in gaudio dispares sint, sicut in claritate cognitionis differunt. De hoc August. ait in lib. de Civ. Dei: Multae mansiones in una domo erunt, scilicet, variae praemiorum dignitates: sed ubi Deus erit omnia in omnibus, erit etiam in dispari claritate par gaudium; ut quod habebunt singuli, commune sit omnibus, quia etiam gloria capitis omnium erit per vinculum charitatis. Ex his datur intelligi quod par gaudium omnes habebunt, etsi disparem cognitionis claritatem, quia per charitatem quae in singulis erit perfecta, tantum quisque gaudebit de bono alterius, quantum gauderet si in se ipso haberet. Sed si par erit cunctorum gaudium, videtur quod par sit omnium beatitudo; quod constat omnino non esse. Ad quod dici potest quod beatitudo par esset si ita esset par gaudium, ut etiam par esset cognitio; sed quia hoc non erit, non faciet paritas gaudii paritatem beatitudinis. Potest etiam sic accipi par gaudium, ut non referatur paritas ad intensionem affectionis gaudentium, sed ad universitatem rerum de quibus laetabitur: quia de omni re unde gaudebit unus, gaudebunt omnes.' Petri Lombardi ... Sententiarum Lib. IV, Distinct. xlix. 4. Compare Aquinas, Summa, Supplement. Quaest. xciii.

All in heaven are perfectly happy in the place assigned to them, is Piccardo's answer to Dante (Paradiso, iii. 70-88): 'So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm, as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth: and his will is our peace.'

ll. 23-4. The variants in these lines show that 1633 has in this poem followed not D, H49, Lec but A18, N, TC.

Page 25. A Valediction: of my name in the window.

I have adopted from the title of this poem in D, H49, Lec the correct manner of entitling all these poems. In the printed editions the titles run straight on, A Valediction of my name, in the window. This has led in the case of the next of these poems, A Valediction of the booke, to the mistake expressed in the title of 1633, Valediction to his Booke, and repeated by Grosart, that the latter was a dedication, 'formed the concluding poem of the missing edition of his poems.' This is a complete mistake. Valediction is the general title of a poem bidding farewell. Of the Booke, Of teares, &c., indicate the particular themes. This is clearly brought out in O'F, where they are brought together and numbered. Valediction 2. of Teares, &c.

Page 26, l. 28. The Rafters of my body, bone. Compare: 'First, Ossa, bones, We know in the naturall and ordinary acceptation, what they are; They are these Beames, and Timbers, and Rafters of these Tabernacles, these Temples of the Holy Ghost, these bodies of ours.' Sermons 80. 51. 516.

Page 27, ll. 31-2.

Till my returne, repaire

And recompact my scattered body so.

This verse is rightly printed in the 1633 edition. In that of 1635 it went wrong; and the errors were transmitted through all the subsequent editions, and have been retained by Grosart and Chambers, but corrected in the Grolier Club edition. The full stop after 'so' was changed to a comma on the natural but mistaken assumption that 'so' pointed forward to the immediately following 'as'. In fact, 'so' refers back to the preceding verse. Donne has described how from his anatomy or skeleton, i.e. his name scratched in the glass, the lady may repair and recompact his whole frame, and he opens the new verse by bidding her do so. Compare: 'In this chapter ... we have Job's Anatomy, Jobs Sceleton, the ruins to which he was reduced.... Job felt the hand of destruction upon him, and he felt the hand of preservation too; and it was all one hand: This is God's Method ... even God's demolitions are super-edifications, his Anatomies, his dissections are so many recompactings, so many resurrections; God winds us off the Skein, that he may weave us up into the whole peece, and he cuts us out of the whole peece into peeces, that he may make us up into a whole garment.' Sermons 80. 43. 127-9. Again, 'It is a divorce and no super-induction, it is a separating, and no redintegration.' Sermons 80. 55. 552. With the third line, 'As all the virtuous powers,' Donne begins a new comparison which is completed in the next stanza. Therefore the sixth stanza closes rightly in the 1633 text with a colon. The full stop of the later editions, which Chambers adopts, is obviously wrong. Grosart has a semicolon, but as he retains the comma at 'so' and puts a semicolon at the end of the previous stanza, the sense becomes very obscure.

Page 28. Twicknam Garden.

l. 1. surrounded with tears: i.e. overflowed with tears, the root idea of 'surrounded'. The Dutch poet translates:

Van suchten hytgedort, van tranen overvloeyt.

Compare: 'The traditional doctrines in the Roman Church, which are so many, as that they overflow even the water of life, the Scriptures themselves, and suppresse and surround them.' Sermons 80. 59. 599.

With this whole poem compare: 'Sir, Because I am in a place and season where I see every thing bud forth, I must do so too, and vent some of my meditations to you.... The pleasantnesse of the season displeases me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older and not better, my strength diminishes and my load growes, and being to pass more and more stormes, I finde that I have not onely cast out all my ballast, which nature and time gives, Reason and discretion, and so am as empty and light as Vanity can make me, but I have overfraught myself with vice, and so am ridd(l)ingly subject to two contrary wracks, Sinking and Oversetting,' &c. Letters (1651), pp. 78-9 (To Sir Henry Goodyere).

l. 15. Indure, nor yet leave loving. This is at first sight a strange reading, and I was disposed to think that 1635-69, which has the support of several MSS. (none of very high textual authority), must be right. It is strange to hear the Petrarchian lover (Donne is probably addressing the Countess of Bedford) speak of 'leaving loving' as though it were in his power. The reading 'nor leave this garden' suits what follows: 'Not to be mocked by the garden and yet to linger here in the vicinity of her I love let me become,' &c.

It is remarkable that D, H49, Lec, and H40 omit this half line. If the same omission was in the MS. from which 1633 printed, the present reading might be an editor's emendation. But it is older than that, for it was the reading of the MS. from which the Dutch poet Huyghens translated, and he has tried by his rhymes to produce the effect of the alliteration:

Maer, om my noch te decken

Voor sulcken ongeval, en niet te min de Min

Te voeren in mijn zin,

Komt Min, en laet my hier yet ongevoelicks wezen.

Donne means, I suppose, 'Not to be mocked by the garden, and yet to be ever the faithful lover.' Compare Loves Deitie, l. 24. 'Love might make me leave loving.' The remainder of the verse may have been suggested by Jonson's

Slow, slow, fresh Fount, keep time with my salt Tears.

Cynthias Revels (1600).

l. 17. I have ventured to adopt 'groane' for 'grow' ('grone' and 'growe' are almost indistinguishable) from A18, N, TC; D, H49, Lec; and H40. It is surely much more in Donne's style than the colourless and pointless 'growe'. It is, too, in closer touch with the next line. If 'growing' is all we are to have predicated of the mandrake, then it should be sufficient for the fountain to 'stand', or 'flow'. The chief difficulty in accepting the MS. reading is that the mandrake is most often said to shriek, sometimes to howl, not to groan:

I prethee yet remember

Millions are now in graves, which at last day

Like mandrakes shall rise shreeking.

Webster, The White Devil, V. vi. 64.

On the other hand the lover most often groans:

In a metaphor where two objects are identified such a transference of attributes is quite permissible. Moreover, although 'shriek' is the more common word, 'groan' is used of the mandrake:

In the Elegie upon ... Prince Henry (p. 269, ll. 53-4) Donne writes:

i.e. a life of groans.

Page 29. A Valediction: of the Booke.

l. 3. Esloygne. Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good English form.

The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that with 's' disappears after the seventeenth century.

Page 30, l. 7. Her who from Pindar could allure. Corinna, who five times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, Var. Hist. xiii. 25, referred to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix. 22.

l. 8. And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame. His wife, Polla Argentaria, who 'assisted her husband in correcting the three first books of his Pharsalia'. LempriÈre. The source of this tradition I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands: 'saepe versum ... complevit ... Argentaria cum Lucano.'

l. 9. And her, whose booke (they say) Homer did finde, and name. I owe my understanding of this line to Professor Norton, who refers to the Myriobiblon or Bibliotheca of Photius, of which the first edition was published at Augsburg in 1601. There Photius, in an abstract of a work by Ptolemy Hephaestion of Alexandria, states that Musaeus' daughter Helena wrote on the war of Troy, and that from her work Homer took the subject of his poem. But another account refers to Phantasia of Memphis, the daughter of Nicarchus, whose work Homer got from a sacred scribe named Pharis at Memphis. This last source is mentioned by LempriÈre, who knows nothing of the other. Probably, therefore, it is the better known tradition.

ll. 21-2. I have interchanged the old semicolon at the end of l. 21 and the comma at the end of l. 22. I take the first three lines of the stanza to form an absolute clause: 'This book once written, in cipher or new-made idiom, we are thereby (in these letters) the only instruments for Loves clergy—their Missal and Breviary.' I presume this is how it is understood by Chambers and the Grolier Club editor, who place a semicolon at the end of each line. It seems to me that with so heavy a pause after l. 21 a full stop would be better at the end of l. 22.

l. 25. Vandals and Goths inundate us. This, the reading of quite a number of independent MSS., seems to me greatly preferable to that of the printed texts:

The agreement of the printed texts does not carry much weight, for any examination of the variants in this poem will reveal that they are errors due to misunderstanding, e.g. l. 20, 'tome,' 'to me,' 'tomb' show that each edition has been printed from the last, preserving, or conjecturally amending, its blunders. If therefore the 1633 editor mistook 'in[~u]date' for 'invade', that is sufficient. Besides the metrical harshness of the line there seems to be no reason why the epithet 'ravenous' should be applied to the Vandals and not extended to the Goths. The metaphor of inundation is used by Donne in the sermons: 'The Torrents, and Inundations, which invasive Armies pour upon Nations, we are fain to call by the name of Law, The Law of Armes.' Sermons 26. 3. 36. Milton too uses it:

Probably both Donne and Milton had in mind Isaiah's description of the Assyrian invasion, where in the Vulgate the word is that used here: 'Propter hoc ecce Dominus adducet super eos aquas fluminis fortes et multas, regem Assyriorum, et omnem gloriam eius; et ascendet super omnes rivos eius, et fluet super universas ripas eius; et ibit per Iudam, inundans, et transiens usque ad collum veniet.' Isaiah viii. 7-8.

Donne uses the word exactly as here in the Essays in Divinity: 'To which foreign sojourning ... many have assimilated and compared the Roman Church's straying into France and being impounded in Avignon seventy years; and so long also lasted the inundation of the Goths in Italy.' Ed. Jessop (1855), p. 155.

Page 31, ll. 37-54. These verses are somewhat difficult but very characteristic. 'In these our letters, wherein is contained the whole mystery of love, Lawyers will find by what titles we hold our mistresses, what dues we are bound to pay as to feudal superiors. They will find also how, claiming prerogative or privilege they devour or confiscate the estates for which we have paid due service, by transferring what we owe to love, to womankind. The service which we pay expecting love in return, they claim as due to their womanhood, and deserving of no recompense, no return of love. Even when going beyond the strict fee they demand subsidies they will forsake a lover who thinks he has thereby secured them, and will plead "honour" or "conscience".'

'Statesmen will learn here the secret of their art. Love and statesmanship both alike depend upon what we might call the art of "bluffing". Neither will bear too curious examination. The statesman and the lover must impose for the moment, disguising weakness or inspiring fear in those who descry it.'

l. 53. In this thy booke, such will their nothing see. After some hesitation I have adopted the 1635-54 reading in preference to that of 1633 and 1669, 'there something.' I do so because (1) the MSS. support it. Their uncertainty as to 'their' and 'there' is of no importance; (2) 'there' is a weak repetition of 'in this thy book', an emphatic enough indication of place; (3) 'their nothing' is both the more difficult reading and the more characteristic of Donne. The art of a statesman is a 'nothing'. He uses the word in the same way of his own Paradoxes and Problems when sending some of them to Sir Henry Wotton, and with the same emphatic stress on the first syllable: 'having this advantage to escape from being called ill things that they are nothings' (An unpublished letter, quoted in the Cambridge History of Literature, vol. iv, p. 218). The word was pronounced with a fully rounded 'no'. Compare Negative Love, l. 16.

With the sentiment compare: 'And as our Alchymists can finde their whole art and worke of Alchymy, not only in Virgil and Ovid, but in Moses and Solomon; so these men can find such a transmutation into golde, such a foundation of profit, in extorting a sense for Purgatory, or other profitable Doctrines, out of any Scripture.' Sermons 80. 78. 791.

'Un personnage de grande dignitÉ, me voulant approuver par authoritÉ cette queste de la pierre philosophale oÙ il est tout plongÉ, m'allegua derniÈrement cinq ou six passages de la Bible, sur lesquels il disoit s'estre premiÈrement fondÉ pour la descharge de sa conscience (car il est de profession ecclesiastique); et, À la veritÉ, l'invention n'en estoit pas seulement plaisante, mais encore bien proprement accommodÉe À la dÉfence de cette belle science.' Montaigne, Apologie de Raimond Sebond (Les Essais, ii. 12).

Page 32, ll. 59-61. To take a latitude, &c. The latitude of a spot may always be found by measuring the distance from the zenith of a star whose altitude, i.e. distance from the equator, is known. The words 'At their brightest' are only used to point the antithesis with the 'dark eclipses' used to measure longitude.

ll. 61-3.

This method of estimating longitude was, it is said, first discovered by noting that an eclipse which took place during the battle of Arbela was observed at Alexandria an hour later. If the time at which an instantaneous phenomenon such as an eclipse of the moon begins at Greenwich (or whatever be the first meridian) is known, and the time of its beginning at whatever place a ship is be then noted, the difference gives the longitude. The eclipses of the moons in Saturn have been used for the purpose. The method is not, however, a practically useful one. Owing to the penumbra it is difficult to observe the exact moment at which an eclipse of the moon begins. In certain positions of Saturn her satellites are not visible. Another method used was to note the lunar distances of certain stars, but the most common and practical method is by the use of well adjusted and carefully corrected chronometers giving Greenwich time.

The comparison in the last five lines rests on a purely verbal basis. 'Longitude' means literally 'length', 'latitude', 'breadth'. Therefore longitude is compared with the duration of love, 'how long this love will be.' There is no real appropriateness.

Page 33. Loves Growth.

ll. 7-8. But if this medicine, &c. 'The quintessence then is a certain matter extracted from all things which Nature has produced, and from everything which has life corporeally in itself, a matter most subtly purged of all impurities and mortality, and separated from all the elements. From this it is evident that the quintessence is, so to say, a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once shut up within things but now free from any domicile and from all outward incorporation. The same is also the colour, the life, the properties of things.... Now the fact that this quintessence cures all diseases does not arise from temperature, but from an innate property, namely its great cleanliness and purity, by which, after a wonderful manner, it alters the body into its own purity, and entirely changes it.... When therefore the quintessence is separated from that which is not the quintessence, as the soul from its body, and itself is taken into the body, what infirmity is able to withstand this so noble, pure, and powerful nature, or to take away our life save death, which being predestined separates our soul and body, as we teach in our treatise on Life and Death. But by whatsoever method it takes place, the quintessence should not be extracted by the mixture or the addition of incongruous matters; but the element of the quintessence must be extracted from a separated body, and in like manner by that separated body which is extracted.' Paracelsus, The Fourth Book of the Archidoxies. Concerning the Quintessence.

The O.E.D. quotes the first sentence of this passage to illustrate its first sense of the word—'the "fifth essence" of ancient and mediaeval philosophy, supposed to be the substance of which the heavenly bodies were composed, and to be actually latent in all things, the extraction of it ... being one of the great objects of Alchemy.' But Paracelsus expressly denies 'that the quintessence exists as a fifth element beyond the other four'; and as he goes on to discuss the different quintessences of different things (each thing having in its constitution the four elements, though one may be predominant) it would seem that he is using the word rather in the second sense given in the O.E.D.—'The most essential part of any substance, extracted by natural or artificial processes.' Probably the two meanings ran into each other. There was a real and an ideal quintessence of things. A specific sense given to the word in older Chemistry is a definite alcoholic tincture obtained by digestion at a gentle heat. This is probably the 'soule of simples' (p. 186, l. 26), unless that also is the quintessence in Paracelsus's full sense of the word.

ll. 17-20.

P reads here:

This certainly makes the verse clearer. As it stands l. 18 is rather an enigma. The stars are not revealed by the sun, but hidden. Grosart's note is equally enigmatical: 'a curious phrase meaning that the stars that show in daylight are not enlarged, but showne to be brighter than their invisible neighbours, and to be comparatively brighter than they appear to be when all are seen together in the darkness of the night.' P is so carelessly written that an occasional good reading may be an old one because there is no evidence of any editing. The copyist seems to have written on without paying any attention to the sense of what he set down. Still, 'Gentle' is the reading of all the other MSS. and editions, and I do not think it is necessary or desirable to change it. But P's emendation shows what Donne meant. By 'showne' he does not mean 'revealed'—an adjectival predicate 'larger' or 'greater' must be supplied from the verb 'enlarg'd'. 'The stars at sunrise are not really made larger, but they are made to seem larger.' It is a characteristically elliptical and careless wording of a characteristically acute and vivid image. Mr. Wells has used the same phenomenon with effect:

'He peered upwards. "Look!" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"In the sky. Already. On the blackness—a little touch of blue. See! The stars seem larger. And the little ones and all those dim nebulosities we saw in empty space—they are hidden."

Swiftly, steadily the day approached us.' The first Men in the Moon. (Chap. vii. Sunrise on the Moon.)

A similar phenomenon is noted by Donne: 'A Torch in a misty night, seemeth greater then in a clear.' Sermons 50. 36. 326.

Page 34. Loves Exchange.

l. 11. A non obstante: a privilege, a waiving of any law in favour of an individual: 'Who shall give any other interpretation, any modification, any Non obstante upon his law in my behalf, when he comes to judge me according to that law which himself hath made.' Sermons 50. 12. 97. 'A Non obstante and priviledge to doe a sinne before hand.' Ibid. 50. 35. 313.

l. 14. minion: i.e. 'one specially favoured or beloved; a dearest friend' &c. O.E.D. Not used in a contemptuous sense. 'John the Minion of Christ upon earth, and survivor of the Apostles, (whose books rather seem fallen from Heaven, and writ with the hand which ingraved the stone Tables, then a mans work)' &c. Sermons 50. 33. 309.

ll. 29 f. Dryden borrows:

Page 36. Confined Love.

Compare with this the poem Loves Freedome in Beaumont's Poems (1652), sig. E. 6:

The third verse runs:

Poems on such themes were doubtless exercises of wit at which more than one author tried his hand in rivalry with his fellows.

l. 16. And not to seeke new lands, or not to deale withall. I have, after some consideration, adhered to the 1633 reading. Chambers has adopted that of the later editions, taking the line to mean that a man builds ships in order to seek new lands and to deal or trade with all lands. But ships cannot trade with inland countries. The form 'withal' is the regular one for 'with' when it follows the noun it governs. 'We build ships not to let them lie in harbours but to seek new lands with, and to trade with.' The MS. evidence is not of much assistance, because it is not clear in all cases what 'w^th all' stands for. The words were sometimes separated even when the simple preposition was intended. 'People, such as I have dealt with all in their marchaundyse.' Berners' Froissart, I. cclxvii. 395 (O.E.D.). But D, H49, Lec read 'w^th All', supporting Chambers.

For the sentiment compare:

For 'deale withall' compare:

Page 37. The Dreame.

I have left the punctuation of the first stanza unaltered. The sense is clear and any modernization alters the rhetoric. Chambers places a semicolon after 'dreame' and a full stop after 'phantasie'. The last is certainly wrong, for the statement 'It was a theme', &c. is connected not with what precedes, but with what follows, 'Therefore thou waked'st me wisely.' In like manner Chambers's full stop after 'but continued'st it' breaks the close connexion with the two following lines, which are really an adverbial clause of explanation or reason. 'My dream thou brokest not, but continued'st it,' for 'Thou art so truth', &c. A full stop might more justifiably be placed after 'histories', but the semicolon is more in Donne's manner.

l. 7. Thou art so truth. The evidence of the MSS. shows that both 'truth' and 'true' were current versions and explains the alteration of 1635-69. But 'truth' is both the more difficult reading and the more subtle expression of Donne's thought; 'true' is the obvious emendation of less metaphysical copyists and editors. Donne's 'Love' is not true as opposed to false only; she is 'truth' as opposed to dreams or phantasms or aught that partakes of unreality. She is essentially truth as God is: 'Respondeo dicendum quod ... veritas invenitur in intellectu, secundum quod apprehendit rem ut est; et in re, secundum quod habet esse conformabile intellectui. Hoc autem maxime invenitur in Deo. Nam esse eius non solum est conforme suo intelligere; et suum intelligere est mensura et causa omnis alterius esse, et omnis alterius intellectus; et ipse est suum esse et intelligere. Unde sequitur quod non solum in ipso sit veritas, sed quod ipse sit ipsa summa et prima veritas. Summa I. vi. 5.

To deify the object of your love was a common topic of love-poetry; Donne does so with all the subtleties of scholastic theology at his finger-ends. In this single poem he attributes to the lady addressed two attributes of Deity, (1) the identity of being and essence, (2) the power of reading the thoughts directly.

The Dutch poet keeps this point:

'A sodain light brought into a room doth awaken some men; but yet a noise does it better.' Sermons 50. 38. 344.

'A candle wakes some men as well as a noise.' Sermons 80. 61. 617.

Modern editors, by removing the comma after 'thoughts', have altered the sense of these lines. It is not that she could read his thoughts better than an angel, but that she could read them at all, a power which is not granted to Angels.

St. Thomas (Summa Theol. Quaest. lvii. Art. 4) discusses 'Utrum angeli cognoscant cogitationes cordium', and concludes, 'Cognoscunt Angeli cordium cogitationes in suis effectibus: ut autem in se ipsis sunt, Deo tantum sunt naturaliter cognitae.' Angels may read our thoughts by subtler signs than our words and acts, or even those changes of countenance and pulsation which we note in each other, 'quanto subtilius huiusmodi immutationes occultas corporales perpendunt.' But to know them as they are in the intellect and will belongs only to God, to whom only the freedom of the human will is subject, and a man's thoughts are subject to his will. 'Manifestum est autem, quod ex sola voluntate dependet, quod aliquis actu aliqua consideret; quia cum aliquis habet habitum scientiae, vel species intelligibiles in eo existentes, utitur eis cum vult. Et ideo dicit Apostolus I Corinth. secundo: quod quae sunt hominis, nemo novit nisi spiritus hominis qui in ipso est.'

Donne recurs to this theme very frequently: 'Let the Schoole dispute infinitely (for he that will not content himself with means of salvation till all Schoole points be reconciled, will come too late); let Scotus and his Heard think, That Angels, and separate souls have a naturall power to understand thoughts ... And let Aquinas present his arguments to the contrary, That those spirits have no naturall power to know thoughts; we seek no farther, but that Jesus Christ himself thought it argument enough to convince the Scribes and Pharisees, and prove himself God, by knowing their thoughts. Eadem Maiestate et potentia sayes S. Hierome, Since you see I proceed as God, in knowing your thoughts, why beleeve you not that I may forgive his sins as God too?' Sermons 80. 11. 111; and compare also Sermons 80. 9. 92.

This point is also preserved in the Dutch version:

M. Legouis in a recent French version has left it ambiguous:

The MS. reading, 14 'but an Angel', heightens the antithesis.

'If it' (i.e. a torch) 'have never been lighted, it does not easily take light, but it must be bruised and beaten first; if it have been lighted and put out, though it cannot take fire of it self, yet it does easily conceive fire, if it be presented within any convenient distance.' Sermons 50. 36. 332.

Page 38. A Valediction: of Weeping.

ll. 1-9. I have changed the comma at l. 6 to a semicolon, as the first image, that of the coins, closes here. Chambers places a full stop at l. 4 'worth', and apparently connects the next two lines with what follows—wrongly, I think. Finishing the figure of the coins, coined, stamped, and given their value by her, Donne passes on to a couple of new images. 'The tears are fruits of much grief; but they are symbols of more to come. For, as your image perishes in each tear that falls, so shall we perish, be nothing, when between us rolls the "salt, estranging sea".'

It is, I suppose, by an inadvertence that Chambers has left 'divers' unchanged to 'diverse'. I cannot think there is any reference to 'a diver in the pearly seas'. Grolier and the Dutch poet divide as here:

Page 39. Loves Alchymie.

l. 7. th'Elixar: i.e. 'the Elixir Vitae', which heals all disease and indefinitely prolongs life. It is sometimes identified with the philosopher's stone, which transmutes metals to gold. In speaking of quintessences (see note, II. p. 30) Paracelsus declares that there are certain quintessences superior to those of gold, marchasite, precious stones, &c., 'of more importance than that they should be called a quintessence. It should be rather spoken of as a certain secret and mystery ... Among these arcana we here put forward four. Of these arcana the first is the mercury of life, the second is the primal matter, the third is the Philosopher's Stone, and the fourth the tincture. But although these arcana are rather angelical than human to speak of we shall not shrink from them.' From the description he gives they all seem to operate more or less alike, purging metals and other bodies from disease.

ll. 7-10. And as no chymique yet, &c. 'My Lord Chancellor gave me so noble and so ready a dispatch, accompanied with so fatherly advice that I am now, like an alchemist, delighted with discoveries by the way, though I attain not mine end.' To ... Sir H. G., Gosse's Life, &c., ii. 49.

ll. 23-4.

The punctuation of these lines in 1633-54 is ambiguous, and Chambers has altered it wrongly to

The MSS. generally support the punctuation which I have adopted, which is that of the Grolier Club edition.

Page 40. The Flea.

I have restored this poem to the place it occupied in 1633. In 1635 it was placed first of all the Songs and Sonets. A strange choice to our mind, but apparently the poem was greatly admired as a masterpiece of wit. It is the first of the pieces translated by Huyghens:

De Vloy.

and was selected for special commendation by some of his correspondents. Coleridge comments upon it in verse:

It will be noticed that there are two versions of Donne's poem.

Page 41. The Curse.

l. 3. His only, and only his purse. This, the reading of all the editions except the last, and of the MSS., is obviously right. What is to dispose 'some dull heart to love' is his only purse and his alone, no one's but his purse. Chambers adopts the 1669 conjecture, 'Him only for his purse,' but in that case there is no subject to 'may dispose', or if 'some dull heart' be subject then 'itself' must be supplied—a harsh construction. 'Dispose' is not used intransitively in this sense.

l. 27. Mynes. I have adopted the plural from the MSS. It brings it into line with the other objects mentioned.

Page 43. The Message.

l. 11. But if it be taught by thine. It seems incredible that Donne should have written 'which if it' &c. immediately after the 'which' of the preceding line. I had thought that the 1633 printer had accidentally repeated from the line above, but the evidence of the MSS. points to the mistake (if it is a mistake) being older than that. 'Which' was in the MS. used by the printer. If 'But' is not Donne's own reading or emendation it ought to be, and I am loath to injure a charming poem by pedantic adherence to authority in so small a point. De minimis non curat lex; but art cares very much indeed. JC and P read 'Yet since it hath learn'd by thine'.

The 'crosse' of all the MSS. is pretty certainly what Donne wrote. An editor would change to 'break' hardly the other way. To 'crosse' is, of course, to 'cancel'. Compare Jonson's Poetaster, Act II, Scene i:

and

Page 44. A Nocturnall, &c.

l. 12. For I am every dead thing. I have not thought it right to alter the 1633 'every' to the 'very' of 1635-69. 'Every' has some MS. support, and it is the more difficult reading, though of course 'a very' might easily enough be misread. But I rather think that 'every' expresses what Donne means. He is 'every dead thing' because he is the quintessence of all negations—'absence, darkness, death: things which are not', and more than that, 'the first nothing.'

ll. 14-18. For his art did expresse ... things which are not. This is a difficult stanza in a difficult poem. I have after considerable hesitation adopted the punctuation of 1719, which is followed by all the modern editors. This makes 'dull privations' and 'lean emptinesse' expansions of 'nothingnesse'. This is the simpler construction. I am not sure, however, that the punctuation of the earlier editions and of the MSS. may not be correct. In that case 'From dull privations' goes with 'he ruined me'. Milton speaks of 'ruining from Heaven'. 'From me, who was nothing', says Donne, 'Love extracted the very quintessence of nothingness—made me more nothing than I already was. My state was already one of "dull privation" and "lean emptiness", and Love reduced it still further, making me once more the non-entity I was before I was created.' Only Donne could be guilty of such refined and extravagant subtlety. But probably this is to refine too much. There is no example of 'ruining' as an active verb used in this fashion. A feature of the MS. collection from which this poem was probably printed is the omission of stops at the end of the line. In the next verse Donne pushes the annihilation further. Made nothing by Love, by the death of her he loves he is made the elixir (i.e. the quintessence) not now of ordinary nothing, but of 'the first nothing', the nothing which preceded God's first act of creation. The poem turns upon the thought of degrees in nothingness.

For 'elixir' as identical with 'quintessence' see Oxf. Eng. Dict., Elixir, † iii. b, and the quotation there, 'A distill'd quintessence, a pure elixar of mischief, pestilent alike to all.' Milton, Church Govt.

Of the 'first Nothing' Donne speaks in the Essays in Divinity (Jessop, 1855), pp. 80-1, but in a rather different strain: 'To speak truth freely there was no such Nothing as this' (the nothing which a man might wish to be) 'before the beginning: for he that hath refined all the old definitions hath put this ingredient Creabile (which cannot be absolutely nothing) into his definition of creation; and that Nothing which was, we cannot desire; for man's will is not larger than God's power: and since Nothing was not a pre-existent matter, nor mother of this all, but only a limitation when any thing began to be; how impossible it is to return to that first point of time, since God (if it imply contradiction) cannot reduce yesterday? Of this we will say no more; for this Nothing being no creature; is more incomprehensible than all the rest.'

ll. 31-2. The Grolier Club edition reads:

which is to me unintelligible. 'If I were a beast, I should prefer some end, some means' refers to the Aristotelian and Schools doctrine of the soul. The soul of man is rational and self-conscious; of beasts perceptive and moving, therefore able to select ends and means; the vegetative soul of plants selects what it can feed on and rejects what it cannot, and so far detests and loves. Even stones, which have no souls, attract and repel. But even of stones Donne says: 'We are not sure that stones have not life; stones may have life; neither (to speak humanely) is it unreasonably thought by them, that thought the whole world to be inanimated by one soule, and to be one intire living creature; and in that respect does S. Augustine prefer a fly before the Sun, because a fly hath life, and the Sun hath not.' Sermons 80. 7. 69-70.

l. 35. If I an ordinary nothing were. 'A shadow is nothing, yet, if the rising or falling sun shines out and there be no shadow, I will pronounce there is no body in that place neither. Ceremonies are nothing; but where there are no ceremonies, order, and obedience, and at last (and quickly) religion itself will vanish.' Sermons (quoted in Selections from Donne, 1840).

l. 41. Enjoy your summer all; This is Grosart's punctuation. The old editions have a comma. Chambers, obviously quite wrongly, retains the comma, and closes the sentence in the next line. The clause 'Since she enjoys her long night's festival' explains 43 'Let me prepare towards her', &c., not 41 'Enjoy your summer all'.

Page 47. The Apparition.

ll. 1-13. The Grolier Club editor places a full stop, Chambers a colon, after 'shrinke', for the comma of the old editions. Chambers's division is better than the first, which interrupts the steady run of the thought to the climax,

The original punctuation preserves the rapid, crowded march of the clauses.

l. 10. This line throws light on the character of the 1669 text. The correct reading of 1633 was spoiled in 1635 by accidentally dropping 'will', and this error continued through 1639-54. The 1669 editor, detecting the metrical fault, made the line decasyllabic by interpolating 'a' and 'even'.

Page 48. The Broken Heart.

l. 8. A flaske of powder burne a day. The 'flash' of later editions is probably a conjectural emendation, for 'flaske' (1633 and many MSS.) makes good sense; and the metaphor of a burning flask of powder seems to suit exactly the later lines which describe what happened to the heart which love inflamed

Shakespeare uses the same simile in a different connexion:

l. 14. and never chawes: 'chaw' is the form Donne generally uses: 'Implicite beleevers, ignorant beleevers, the adversary may swallow; but the understanding beleever, he must chaw, and pick bones, before he come to assimilate him, and make him like himself.' Sermons 80. 18. 178.

Page 49. A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.

This poem is quoted by Walton after his account of the vision which Donne had of his wife in France, in 1612: 'I forbear the readers farther trouble as to the relation and what concerns it, and will conclude mine with commending to his view a copy of verses given by Mr. Donne to his wife at the time that he then parted from her: and I beg leave to tell, that I have heard some critics, learned both in languages and poetry, say, that none of the Greek or Latin poets did ever equal them.' The critics probably included Wotton,—perhaps also Hales, whose criticism of Shakespeare shows the same readiness to find our own poets as good as the Ancients.

The song, 'Sweetest love I do not go,' was probably written at the same time. It is almost identical in tone. They are certainly the tenderest of Donne's love poems, perhaps the only ones to which the epithet 'tender' can be applied. The Valediction: of weeping is more passionate.

An early translation of this poem into Greek verse is found in a volume in the Bodleian Library.

ll. 9-12. Moving of th'earth, &c. 'The "trepidation" was the precession of the equinoxes, supposed, according to the Ptolemaic astronomy, to be caused by the movements of the Ninth or Crystalline Sphere.' Chambers.

l. 16. Those things which elemented it. Chambers follows 1669 and reads 'The thing'—wrongly, I think. 'Elemented' is just 'composed', and the things are enumerated later, 20. 'eyes, lips, hands.' Compare:

This and the fellow poem Upon Absence may be compared with Donne's poems on the same theme. See Saintsbury's Caroline Poets, i, pp. 548, 550.

l. 20. and hands: 'and' has the support of all the MSS. The want of it is no great loss, for though without it the line moves a little irregularly, 'and hands' is not a pleasant concatenation.

ll. 25-36. If they be two, &c. Donne's famous simile has a close parallel in Omar Khayyam. Whether Donne's 'hydroptic immoderate thirst of humane learning and languages' extended to Persian I do not know. Captain Harris has supplied me with translations and reference:

In these twin compasses, O Love, you see

One body with two heads, like you and me,

Which wander round one centre, circle wise,

But at the last in one same point agree.

Whinfield's edition of Omar Khayyam (Kegan Paul,

TrÜbner, 1901, Oriental Series, p. 216).

'Oh my soul, you and I are like a compass. We form but one body having two points. Truly one point moves from the other point, and makes the round of the circle; but the day draws near when the two points must re-unite.' J. H. M^cCarthy (D. Nutt, 1898).

Page 51. The Extasie.

This is one of the most important of the lyrics as a statement of Donne's metaphysic of love, of the interconnexion and mutual dependence of body and soul. It is printed in 1633 from D, H49, Lec or a MS. resembling it, and from this and the other MSS. I have introduced some alterations in the text: and two rather vital emendations, ll. 55 and 59. The Extasie is probably the source of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's best known poem, An Ode Upon a Question Moved Whether Love Should Continue For Ever. Compare with the opening lines of Donne's poem:

In a letter to Sir Thomas Lucy, Donne writes: 'Sir I make account that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of extasie, and a departing, and secession, and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate itself to two bodies.' Ecstasy in Neo-Platonic philosophy was the state of mind in which the soul, escaping from the body, attained to the vision of God, the One, the Absolute. Plotinus thus describes it: 'Even the word vision (??aa) does not seem appropriate here. It is rather an ecstasy (??stas??), a simplification, an abandonment of self, a perfect quietude (st?s??), a desire of contact, in short a wish to merge oneself in that which one contemplates in the Sanctuary.' Sixth Ennead, ix. 11 (from the French translation of Bouillet, 1857-8). Readers will observe how closely Donne's poem agrees with this—the exodus of the souls (ll. 15-16), the perfect quiet (ll. 18-20), the new insight (ll. 29-33), the contact and union of the souls (l. 35). Donne had probably read Ficino's translation of Plotinus (1492), but the doctrine of ecstasy passed into Christian thought, connecting itself especially with the experience of St. Paul (2 Cor. xii. 2). St. Paul's word is ??pa???ta, and Aquinas distinguishes between 'raptus' and 'ecstasis': 'Extasis importat simpliciter excessum a seipso ... raptus super hoc addit violentiam quandam.' Another word for 'ecstasy' was 'enthusiasm'.

l. 9. So to entergraft our hands. All the later editions read 'engraft', which makes the line smoother. But to me it seems more probable that Donne wrote 'entergraft' and later editors changed this to 'engraft', than that the opposite should have happened. Moreover, 'entergraft' gives the reciprocal force correctly, which 'engraft' does not. Donne's precision is as marked as his subtlety. 'Entergraft' has the support of all the best MSS.

Page 52, l. 20. And wee said nothing all the day. 'En amour un silence vaut mieux qu'un langage. Il est bon d'Être interdit; il y a une Éloquence de silence qui pÉnÈtre plus que la langue ne saurait faire. Qu'un amant persuade bien sa maÎtresse quand il est interdit, et que d'ailleurs il a de l'esprit! Quelque vivacitÉ que l'on ait, il est bon dans certaines rencontres qu'elle s'Éteigne. Tout cela se passe sans rÈgle et sans rÉflexion; et quand l'esprit le fait, il n'y pensait pas auparavant. C'est par nÉcessitÉ que cela arrive.' Pascal, Discours sur les passions de l'amour.

l. 32. Wee see, wee saw not what did move. Chambers inserts a comma after 'we saw not', perhaps rightly; but the punctuation of the old editions gives a distinct enough sense, viz., 'We see now, that we did not see before the true source of our love. What we thought was due to bodily beauty, we perceive now to have its source in the soul.' Compare, 'But when I wakt, I saw, that I saw not.' The Storme, l. 37.

l. 42. Interinanimates two soules. The MSS. give the word which the metre requires and which I have no doubt Donne used. The verb inanimates occurs more than once in the sermons. 'One that quickens and inanimates all, and is the soul of the whole world.' Sermons 80. 29. 289. 'That universall power which sustaines, and inanimates the whole world.' Ibid. 80. 31. 305. 'In these bowels, in the womb of this promise we lay foure thousand yeares; The blood with which we were fed then, was the blood of the Sacrifices, and the quickening which we had there, was an inanimation, by the often refreshing of this promise of that Messias in the Prophets.' Ibid. 80. 38. 381. 'Hee shews them Heaven, and God in Heaven, sanctifying all their Crosses in this World, inanimating all their worldly blessings.' Ibid. 80. 44. 436.

Page 53, l. 51. They'are ours though they'are not wee, Wee are The line as given in all the MSS. is metrically, in the rhetorically effective position of the stresses, superior to the shortened form of the editions:

l. 52. the spheare. The MSS. all give the singular, the editions the plural. Donne is not incapable of making a singular rhyme with a plural, or at any rate a form with 's' with one without:

Still, I think 'spheare' is right. The bodies made one are the Sphere in which the two Intelligences meet and command. This suits all that followes:

The Dutch translation runs:

l. 55. forces, sense, This reading of all the MSS. is, I think, certainly right; the 'senses force' of the editions being an emendation. (1) It is the more difficult reading. It is inconceivable that an ordinary copyist would alter 'senses force' to 'forces sense', which, unless properly commaed, is apt to be read as 'forces' sense' and make nonsense. (2) It is more characteristic of Donne's thought. He is, with his usual scholastic precision, distinguishing the functions of soul and body. Perception is the function (the d??a??, power or force) of soul:

But the body has its function also, without which the soul could not fulfil its; and that function is 'sense'. It is through this medium that human souls must operate to obtain knowledge of each other. The bodies must yield their forces or faculties ('sense' in all its forms, especially sight and touch—hands and eyes) to us before our souls can become one. The collective term 'sense' recurs:

'Aucuns ont escrit que l'air a aussi cette vertu de faire decouler avec le feu elementaire les influences et proprietez secrettes des estoilles et planettes: alleguans que l'efficace des corps celestes ne peut s'estendre aux inferieurs et terrestres, que par les moyens et elemens qui sont entre deux. Mais cela soit au iugement des lecteurs que nous renvoyons aux disputes de ceux qui ont escrit sur la philosophie naturelle. Voyez aussi Pline au 5 ch. du 2 liu., Plutarque au 5 & 2 liu. des opinions des Philosophes, Platon en son Timee, Aristote en ses disputes de physique, specialement au i. liu. de la generation et corruption, et ceux qui ont escrit depuis luy touchant les elemens.' Du Bartas, La Sepmaine, &c. (1581), Indice. Air.

l. 59. Soe soule into the soule may flow. The 'Soe' of the MSS. must, I think, be right rather than the 'For' of D, H49, Lec, and the editions. It corresponds to the 'So' in l. 65, and it expresses the simpler and more intelligible thought. In references to the heavenly bodies and their influence on men one must remember certain aspects of older thought which have become unfamiliar to us. They were bodies of great dignity, 'aeterna corpora,' not composed of any of the four elements, and subject to no change in time but movement, change of position. If not as the older philosophers and some of the Fathers had held, 'animata corpora,' having a soul united to the body, yet each was guided by an Intelligence operating by contact: 'Ad hoc autem quod moveat, non opportet quod uniatur ei ut forma, sed per contactum virtutis, sicut motor unitur mobili.' Aquinas, Summa I. lxx. 3. Such bodies, it was claimed, influence human actions: 'Corpora enim coelestia, cum moveantur a spiritualibus substantiis ... agunt in virtute earum quasi instrumenta. Sed illae substantiae spirituales sunt superiores animabus nostris. Ergo videtur quod possint imprimere in animas nostras, et sic causare actus humanos.' Aquinas, however, disputes this, as Plotinus had before him, and distinguishes: As bodies, the stars affect us only indirectly, in so far namely as the mind and will of man are subject to the influence of physical and corporeal disturbances. But man's will remains free. 'Sapiens homo dominatur astris in quantum scilicet dominatur suis passionibus.' As Intelligences, the stars do not operate on man thus mediately and controllingly: 'sed in intellectum humanum agunt immediate illuminando: voluntatem autem immutare non possunt.' Aquinas, Summa I. cxv. 4.

Now if 'Soe' be the right reading here then Donne is thinking of the heavenly bodies without distinguishing in them between soul or intelligence and body. 'As these high bodies or beings operate on man's soul through the comparatively low intermediary of air, so lovers' souls must interact through the medium of body.'

If 'For' be the right reading, then Donne is giving as an example of soul operating on soul through the medium of body the influence of the heavenly intelligences on our souls. But this is not the orthodox view of their interaction. I feel sure that 'Soe' is the right reading. The thought and construction are simpler, and 'Soe' and 'For' are easily interchanged.

Of noblemen Donne says: 'They are Intelligences that move great Spheares.' Sermon, Judges xv. 20, p. 20 (1622).

'Spirit is a most subtile vapour, which is expressed from the Bloud, and the instrument of the soule, to perform all his actions; a common tye or medium betwixt the body and the soule, as some will have it; or as Paracelsus, a fourth soule of itselfe. Melancthon holds the fountaine of these spirits to be the Heart, begotten there; and afterward convayed to the Braine, they take another nature to them. Of these spirits there be three kindes, according to the three principall parts, Braine, Heart, Liver; Naturall, Vitall, Animall. The Naturall are begotten in the Liver, and thence dispersed through the Veines, to performe those naturall actions. The Vitall Spirits are made in the Heart, of the Naturall, which by the Arteries are transported to all the other parts: if these Spirits cease, then life ceaseth, as in a Syncope or Swowning. The Animall spirits formed of the Vitall, brought up to the Braine, and diffused by the Nerves, to the subordinate Members, give sense and motion to them all.' Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1638), p. 15. 'The spirits in a man which are the thin and active part of the blood, and so are of a kind of middle nature, between soul and body, those spirits are able to doe, and they doe the office, to unite and apply the faculties of the soul to the organs of the body, and so there is a man.' Sermons 26. 20. 291.

Page 55. Loves Diet.

ll. 19-24. This stanza, carefully and correctly printed in the 1633 edition, which I have followed, was mangled in that of 1635, and has remained in this condition, despite conjectural emendations, in subsequent editions, including those of Grosart and Chambers. What Donne says is obvious: 'Whatever Love dictated I wrote, but burned the letters. When she wrote to me, and when (correctly resumed by 'that') that favour made him (i.e. Love) fat, I said,' &c. The 1650-54 'Whate'er might him distaste,' &c. is obviously an attempt to put right what has gone wrong. No reading but that of the 1633 edition gives any sense to 'that favour' and 'convey'd by this'.

ll. 25-7. reclaim'd ... sport. In 1633 'reclaim'd' became 'redeem'd', probably owing to the frequent misreading of 'cl' as 'd'. The mistake here increases the probability that 'sports' is an error for 'sport' or 'sporte'. It is doubtful if 'sports' was used as now.

Page 56. The Will.

ll. 19-27. This verse is omitted in most of the MSS. Probably in James's reign its references to religion were thought too outspoken and flippant. Charles admired in Donne not only the preacher but also the poet, as Huyghens testifies.

The first three lines turn on a contrast that Donne is fond of elaborating between the extreme Protestant doctrine of justification by faith only and the Catholic, especially Jesuit, doctrine of co-operant works. It divided the Jesuits and the Jansenists. The Jansenists had not yet emerged, but their precursors in the quarrel (as readers of Les Provinciales will recall) were the Dominicans, to whom Donne refers: 'So also when in the beginning of S. Augustines time, Grace had been so much advanced that mans Nature was scarce admitted to be so much as any means or instrument (not only no kind of cause) of his own good works: And soon after in S. Augustines time also mans free will (by fierce opposition and arguing against the former error) was too much overvalued, and admitted into too near degrees of fellowship with Grace; those times admitted a doctrine and form of reconciliation, which though for reverence to the time, both the Dominicans and Jesuits at this day in their great quarrell about Grace and Free Will would yet seem to maintaine, yet indifferent and dispassioned men of that Church see there is no possibility in it, and therefore accuse it of absurdity, and almost of heresie.' Letters (1651), pp. 15-16. As an Anglican preacher Donne upheld James's point of view, that the doctrine of grace and free-will was better left undiscussed: 'Resistibility, and Irresistibility of Grace, which is every Artificers wearing now, was a stuff that our Fathers wore not, a language that pure antiquity spake not.... They knew Gods law, and his Chancery: But for Gods prerogative, what he could do of his absolute power, they knew Gods pleasure, Nolumus disputari: It should scarce be disputed of in Schools, much less serv'd in every popular pulpit to curious and itching ears; least of all made table-talke, and houshold-discourse.' Sermons 26. 1. 4.

The 'Schismaticks of Amsterdam' were the extreme Puritans. See Jonson's The Alchemist for Tribulation Wholesome and 'We of the separation'.

Page 58. The Funerall.

l. 3. That subtile wreath of haire, which crowns my arme; 'And Theagenes presented her with a diamond ring which he used to wear, entreating her, whensoever she did cast her eyes upon it, to conceive that it told her in his behalf, that his heart would prove as hard as that stone in the admittance of any new affection; and that his to her should be as void of end as that circular figure was;' (compare A Ieat Ring sent, p. 65) 'and she desired him to wear for her sake a lock of hair which she gave him; the splendour of which can be expressed by no earthly thing, but it seemed as though a stream of the sun's beams had been gathered together and converted into a solid substance. With this precious relique about his arm,' (compare The Relique, p. 62) 'whose least hair was sufficient' (compare Aire and Angels, p. 22, 'Ev'ry thy hair' and note) 'to bind in bonds of love the greatest heart that ever was informed with life, Theagenes took his journey into Attica.' Kenelm Digby's Private Memoirs (1827), pp. 80-1. When later Theagenes heard that Stelliana (believing Theagenes to be dead) was to wed Mardonius, 'he tore from his arm the bracelet of her hair ... and threw it into the fire that was in his chamber; when that glorious relic burning shewed by the wan and blue colour of the flame that it had sense and took his words unkindly in her behalf.'

Theagenes was Sir Kenelm Digby himself, Stelliana being Lady Venetia Stanley, afterwards his wife. Mardonius was probably Edward, Earl of Dorset, the brother of Donne's friend and patron.

It is probable that this sequence of poems, The Funerall, The Blossome, The Primrose and The Relique, was addressed to Mrs. Herbert in the earlier days of Donne's intimacy with her in Oxford or London.

l. 24. That since you would save none of me, I bury some of you. I have hesitated a good deal over this line. The reading of the editions is 'have none of me'; and in the group of MSS. D, H49, Lec, while H49 reads 'save', D has corrected 'have' to what may be 'save', and Lec reads 'have'. The reading of the editions is the full form of the construction, which is more common without the 'have'. 'It's four to one she'll none of me,' Twelfth Night, I. iii. 113; 'She will none of him,' Ibid. II. ii. 9, are among Schmidt's examples (Shakespeare Lexicon), in none of which 'have' occurs. The reading of the MSS., 'save none of me,' is also quite idiomatic, resembling the 'fear none of this' (i.e. 'do not fear this') of Winter's Tale, IV. iv. 601; and I have preferred it because: (1) It seems difficult to understand how it could have arisen if 'have none' was the original. (2) It gives a sharper antithesis, 'You would not save me, keep me alive. Therefore I will bury, not you indeed, but a part of you.' (3) To be saved is the lover's usual prayer; and the idea of the poem is that his death is due to the lady's cruelty.

Compare also the Letter To M^rs M. H. (pp. 216-8), where the same idea recurs:

Page 59. The Blossome.

l. 10. labour'st. The form with 't' occurs in most of the MSS., and 't' is restored in 1635. The 'labours' of 1633 represents a common dropping of the 't' for ease of pronunciation. See Franz, Shakespeare-Grammatik, § 152. It is colloquial, and I doubt if Donne would have preserved it if he had printed the poem, supposing that he wrote the word so, and not some copyist.

I have adopted the MS. readings 'tongue' and 'what need you a heart?' because they seem to me more certainly what Donne wrote. He may have altered them, but so may an editor. 'Tongue' is more exactly parallel to eyes and ears, and the whole talk is of organs. 'What need you a heart?' is more pointed. 'With these organs of sense, what need have you of a heart?' The idiom was not uncommon, the verb being used impersonally. The O.E.D. gives among others:

'What need your heart go' is of course also idiomatic. The latest example the O.E.D. gives is from Hall's Satires, 1597: 'What needs me care for any bookish skill?'

Page 61. The Primrose, &c.

It is noteworthy that the addition 'being at Montgomery Castle', &c. was made in 1635. It is unknown to 1633 and the MSS. It may be unwarranted. If it be accurate, then the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and is a half mystical, half cynical description of Platonic passion. The perfect primrose has apparently five petals, but more or less may be found. Seeking for one to symbolize his love, he fears to find either more or less. What can be less than woman? But if more than woman she becomes that unreal thing, the object of Platonic affection and Petrarchian adoration: but, as he says elsewhere,

Let woman be content to be herself. Since five is half ten, united with man she will be half of a perfect life; or (and the cynical humour breaks out again) if she is not content with that, since five is the first number which includes an even number (2) and an odd (3), it may claim to be the perfect number, and she to be the whole in which we men are included and absorbed. We have no will of our own.

'From Sarai's name He took a letter which expressed the number ten, and reposed one which made but five; so that she contributed that five which man wanted before, to show a mutual indigence and support.' Essays in Divinity (Jessop, 1855), p. 118.

'Even for this, he will visite to the third, and fourth generation; and three and foure are seven, and seven is infinite. Sermons 50. 47. 440.

l. 30. this, five, I have introduced a comma after 'this' to show what, I think, must be the relation of the words. The later editions drop 'this', and it seems to me probable that an original reading and a correction have survived side by side. Donne may have written 'this' alone, referring back to 'five', and then, thinking the reference too remote, he may have substituted 'five' in the margin, whence it crept into the text without completely displacing 'this'. The support which the MSS. lend to 1633 make it dangerous to remove either word now, but I have thought it well to show that 'this' is 'five'. In the MSS. when a word is erased a line is drawn under it and the substituted word placed in the margin.

Page 62. The Relique.

l. 13. Where mis-devotion doth command. The unanimity of the earlier editions and the MSS. shows clearly that 'Mass-devotion' (which Chambers adopts) is merely an ingenious conjecture of the 1669 editor. Donne uses the word frequently, e.g.:

and: 'This mis-devotion, and left-handed piety, of praying for the dead.' Sermons 80. 77. 780.

l. 17. You shalbe. I have recorded this reading of several MSS. because the poem is probably addressed to Mrs. Herbert and Donne may have so written. His discrimination of 'thou' and 'you' is very marked throughout the poems. 'Thou' is the pronoun of feeling and intimacy, 'you' of respect. Compare 'To Mrs. M. H.', and remember that Mrs. Herbert's name was Magdalen.

ll. 27-8. Comming and going, wee Perchance might kisse, but not between those meales: i.e. the kiss of salutation and parting. In a sermon on the text 'Kisse the Son, lest he be angry', Donne enumerates the uses of kissing sanctioned by the Bible, and this among them: 'Now by this we are slid into our fourth and last branch of our first part, The perswasion to come to this holy kisse, though defamed by treachery, though depraved by licentiousnesse, since God invites us to it, by so many good uses thereof in his Word. It is an imputation laid upon Nero, that Neque adveniens neque proficiscens, That whether comming or going he never kissed any: And Christ himself imputes it to Simon, as a neglect of him, That when he came into his house he did not kisse him. This then was in use', &c. Sermons 80. 41. 407.

The kiss of salutation lasted in some countries till the later eighteenth century, perhaps still lasts. See Rousseau's Confessions, Bk. 9, and Byron's Childe Harold, III. lxxix.

But Erasmus, in 1499, speaks as though it were a specially English custom: 'Est praeterea mos nunquam satis laudatus. Sive quo venis, omnium osculis exciperis; sive discedis aliquo, osculis dimitteris; redis, redduntur suavia; venitur ad te, propinantur suavia; disceditur abs te, dividuntur basia; occurritur alicubi, basiatur affatim; denique quocunque te moves, suaviorum plena sunt omnia.'

Page 64. The Dissolution.

l. 10. earthly sad despaire. Cf. O.E.D.: 'Earthly. 3. Partaking of the nature of earth, resembling earth as a substance, consisting of earth as an element; = Earthy, archaic or obsolete.' The form was used as late as 1843, but the change in the later editions of Donne indicates that it was growing rare in this sense. Compare, 'A young man of a softly disposition.' Camden's Reign of Elizabeth (English transl.).

Page 66. Negative Love.

l. 15. What we know not, our selves. 'All creatures were brought to Adam, and, because he understood the natures of all those creatures, he gave them names accordingly. In that he gave no name to himselfe it may be by some perhaps argued, that he understood himselfe lesse then he did other creatures.' Sermons 80. 50. 563.

Page 67. The Prohibition.

l. 18. So, these extreames shall neithers office doe. The 'neithers' of D, H40, JC, supported by 'neyther' in O'F and 'neyther their' in Cy, is much more characteristic than 'ne'er their', and more likely to have been altered than to have been substituted for 'ne'er their'. The reading of Cy shows how the phrase puzzled an ordinary copyist. 'These extremes shall by counteracting each other prevent either from fulfilling his function.' Compare, 'As two yoke-devils sworn to either's purpose' (i.e. each to the other's purpose). Shakespeare, Hen. V, II. ii. 107.

l. 22. So shall I, live, thy stage not triumph bee. I have placed a comma after I to make quite clear that 'live' is the adjective, not the verb. The 'stay' of 1633 is defensible, but the 1633 editor was somewhat at sea about this poem, witness the variations introduced while the edition was printing in ll. 20 and 24 and the misprinting of l. 5. All the MSS. I have consulted support 'stage'; and this gives the best meaning: 'Alive, I shall continue to be the stage on which your victories are daily set forth; dead, I shall be but your triumph, a thing achieved once, never to be repeated.' Compare:

ll. 23, 24. There are obviously two versions of these lines which the later editions have confounded. The first is that of the text, from 1633. The second is that of the MSS. and runs, properly pointed:

The punctuation of the MSS. is very careless, but the lines as printed are quite intelligible. As given in the editions 1635-69 they are nonsensical.

Page 68. The Expiration.

l. 5. We ask'd. The past tense of the MSS. makes the antithesis and sense more pointed. 'It was with no one's leave we lov'd to begin with, and we will owe to no one the death that comes with parting.'

Compare:

Page 70. The Paradox.

l. 14. lights life. The MSS. correct the obvious mistake of the editions, 'lifes light.' The 'lights life' is, of course, the sun. In the same way at 21 'lye' is surely better suited than 'dye' to an epitaph. This poem is not in D, H49, Lec, and 1633 has printed it from A18, N, TC.

In the latter group of MSS. this poem is followed immediately by another of the same kind, which is found also in H40, RP31, and O'F, as well as several more miscellaneous MSS. I print from TCC:

A Paradox.

FINIS.

Page 71. Farewell to Love.

l. 12. His highnesse &c. 'Presumably his highness was made of gilt gingerbread.' Chambers. See Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, III. i.

ll. 28-30. As these lines stand in the old editions they are unintelligible:

Grosart prints:

This and the note which he appends I find more incomprehensible than the old text. This is his note: 'The whole sense then is: Unless Nature decreed this in order that man should despise it, (just) as she made it short, that man might for that reason also despise a sport that was only for a minute made to be eager desires to raise posterity.' Surely this is Abracadabra!

What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire' to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i.e. in the species, not in the individual.' (De Anima, B. 4. 415 A-B.) Donne's argument then is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love? Is it a device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon man, the curse of mortality,

The latest use of 'eager' as a verb quoted by the O.E.D. is from Mulcaster's Positions (1581), where the sense is that of imitating physically: 'They that be gawled ... may neither runne nor wrastle for eagering the inward'. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's: 'The nature of som men is so ... unconvenable that ... poverte myhte rather egren hym to don felonies.' Chaucer, BoËth. De Consol. Phil. In the Burley MS. (seventeenth century) the following epigram on Bancroft appears:

In Harl. MS. 4908 f. 83 the last line reads:

Page 71. A Lecture upon the Shadow.

The text of this poem in the editions is that of A18, N, TC among the MSS. A slightly different recension is found in most of the other MSS. The chief difference is that the latter read 'love' for 'loves' at ll. 9, 14, and 19. They also, however, read 'least' for 'high'st' at l. 12. In l. 19 they vacillate between 'once' and 'our'. It would not be difficult to defend either version. The only variation from the printed text which I have admitted is that on which all the MSS. are unanimous, viz. 'first' for 'short' in l. 26; 'short' is an obvious blunder.

Note on the music to which certain of Donne's songs were set.

A song meant for the Elizabethans a poem intended to be sung, generally to the accompaniment of the lute. Donne had clearly no thought of his songs being an exception to this rule:

Yet it is difficult to think of some, perhaps the majority, of Donne's Songs and Sonets as being written to be sung. Their sonorous and rhetorical rhythm, the elaborate stanzas which, like the prolonged periods of the Elegies, seem to give us a foretaste of the Miltonic verse-paragraph, suggest speech,—impassioned, rhythmical speech rather than the melody of song. We are not haunted by a sense of the tune to which the song should go, as we are in reading the lyrics of the Elizabethan Anthologies or of Robert Burns. Yet some of Donne's songs were set to music. A note in one group of MSS. describes three of them as 'Songs which were made to certain ayres which were made before'. One of these is The Baite, which must have been set to the same air as Marlowe's song. I reproduce here a lute-accompaniment found in William Corkine's Second Book of Ayres (1612). The airs of the other two (see p. 18 (note)) I have not been able to find, nor are they known to Mr. Barclay Squire, who has kindly helped and guided me in this matter of the music. With his aid I have reproduced here the music of two other songs, and, at another place, that of one of Donne's great Hymns.

Page 8. Song.

Page 23. Breake of Day.

Page 46. The Baite.