Page 191. To the Countesse of Bedford.

ll. 1-6. The sense of this verse, carefully and correctly printed in the 1633 edition, was obscured if not corrupted by the insertion of a semicolon after 'Fortune' in the later editions. The correct punctuation was restored in 1719, which was followed in subsequent editions until Grosart returned to that of the 1635-39 editions (which the Grolier Club editor also adopts), and Chambers completed the confusion by printing the lines thus,

You have refined me, and to worthiest things—

Virtue, art, beauty, fortune.

Even Mr. Gosse has been misled into quoting this truncated and enigmatical compliment to Lady Bedford, regarding it, I presume, as of the same nature as Shakespeare's lines,

Spirits are not finely touch'd,

But to fine issues.

But this has a meaning; what meaning is there in saying that a man is refined to 'beauty and fortune'? Poor Donne was not likely to boast of either at this time. What he says is something quite different, and strikes the key-note of the poem. 'You have refined and sharpened my judgement, and now I see that the worthiest things owe their value to rareness or use. Value is nothing intrinsic, but depends on circumstances.' This, the next two verses add, explains why at Court it is your virtue which transcends, in the country your beauty. To Donne the country is always dull and savage; the court the focus of wit and beauty, though not of virtue. On the relative nature of all goodness he has touched in the Progresse of the Soule, p. [316], ll. 518-20:

There's nothing simply good nor ill alone;

Of every quality Comparison

The only measure is, and judge, Opinion.

With the sentiment regarding Courts compare: 'Beauty, in courts, is so necessary to the young, that those who are without it, seem to be there to no other purpose than to wait on the triumphs of the fair; to attend their motions in obscurity, as the moon and stars do the sun by day; or at best to be the refuge of those hearts which others have despised; and by the unworthiness of both to give and take a miserable comfort.' Dryden, Dedication of the Indian Emperor.

ll. 8-9.

(Where a transcendent height, (as lownesse mee)

Makes her not be, or not show)

I have completed the enclosure of (Where ... show) in brackets which 1633 began but forgot to carry out. The statement is parenthetical, and it is of the essence of Donne's wit to turn aside in one parenthesis to make another, dart from one distracting thought to a further, returning at the end to the main track. He has left the Countess for a moment to explain why the Court 'is not Vertues clime'. She is too transcendent to be, or at any rate to be seen there, as I (he adds, quite irrelevantly) am too low. Then taking up again the thought of the first line he continues: 'all my rhyme is claimed there by your vertues, for there rareness gives them value. I am the comment on what there is a dark text; the usher who announces one that is a stranger.'

For brackets within brackets compare: 'And yet it is imperfect which is taught by that religion which is most accommodate to sense (I dare not say to reason (though it have appearance of that too) because none may doubt but that that religion is certainly best which is reasonablest) That all mankinde hath one protecting Angel; all Christians one other, all English one other, all of one Corporation and every civill coagulation or society one other; and every man one other.' Letters, p. 43.

l. 13. To this place: i.e. Twickenham. O'F heads the poem To the Countesse of Bedford, Twitnam. The poem is written to welcome her home. See l. 70.

The development of Donne's subtle and extravagant conceits is a little difficult. The Countess is the sun which exhales the sweetness of the country when she comes thither (13-18). Apparently the Countess has returned to Twickenham in Autumn, perhaps arriving late in the evening. When she emerges from her chariot it is the breaking of a new day, the beginning of a new year or new world. Both the Julian and the Gregorian computations are thus falsified (19-22). It shows her truth to nature that she will not suffer a day which begins at a stated hour, but only one that begins with the actual appearance of the light (23-4: a momentary digression). Since she, the Sun, has thus come to Twickenham, the Court is made the Antipodes. While the 'vulgar sun' is an Autumnal one, this Sun which is in Spring, receives our sacrifices. Her priests, or instruments, we celebrate her (25-30). Then Donne draws back from the religious strain into which he is launching. He will not sing Hymns as to a Deity, but offer petitions as to a King, that he may view the beauty of this Temple, and not as Temple, but as Edifice. The rest of the argument is simpler.

l. 60. The same thinge. The singular of the MSS. seems to be required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of Lec, the MS. representing most closely that from which 1633 was printed.

ll. 71-2. Who hath seene one, &c. 'Who hath seen one, e.g. Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek out the Cherubim.' The construction is elliptical. Compare:

P. [286], l. 44.Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday.

The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels: 'The Spirit of Chastity ... in the likenesse of a faire beautifull Cherubine.' Bacon, New Atlantis (1658), 22 (O.E.D.).

Page 193. To Sr Edward Herbert. at Iulyers.

Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos 'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. Autobiography, ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry. His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, Look to me Faith, to match Sir Ed. Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's Conversations, ed. Laing.) The poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In 1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on Mistress Boulstred.

l. 1. Man is a lumpe, &c. The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed from Plato, The Republic, ix. 588 B-E.

Page 194, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold: 'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca contra napellum.' Benvenuto on Dante, Div. Comm.: Paradiso, i. The plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the O.E.D. quotes Swan, Spec. M. vi. § 4 (1643), 'Hemlock ... is meat to storks and poison to men.' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, Sat. v. 145; Ovid, Amores, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, Sat. vii. 206, a reference to Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas ... cicutas'.

ll. 31-2. Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c. These lines are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod. Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil which misleads him.' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod', referring 'his' to God—which seems hardly possible.

ll. 34-8. wee'are led awry, &c. Chambers's punctuation of this passage is clearly erroneous:

we're led awry

By them, who man to us in little show,

Greater than due; no form we can bestow

On him, for man into himself can draw

All;

This must mean that we are led astray by those who, in their abridgement of man, still show him to us greater than he really is. But this is the opposite of what Donne says. 'Greater than due' goes with 'no form'. Compare:

'And therefore the Philosopher draws man into too narrow a table, when he says he is Microcosmos, an Abridgement of the world in little: Nazianzen gives him but his due, when he calls him Mundum Magnum, a world to which all the rest of the world is but subordinate: For all the world besides, is but God's Foot-stool; Man sits down upon his right-hand,' &c. Sermons 26. 25. 370.

'It is too little to call Man a little world; Except God, Man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world; than the world doth, nay than the world is.' Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, &c. (1624), p. 64.

On the other hand the Grolier Club editor has erroneously followed 1635-69 in altering the full stop after 'chaw' to a comma; and has substituted a semicolon for the comma after 'fill' (l. 39), reading:

for man into himself can draw

All; all his faith can swallow or reason chaw,

All that is filled, and all that which doth fill;

But 'All that is fill'd,' &c. is not object to 'can draw'. It is subject (in apposition with 'All the round world') to 'is but a pill'.

Page 195, l. 47. This makes it credible. I have changed the comma after 'credible' to a semicolon to avoid the misapprehension, into which the Grolier Club editor seems to have fallen, that what is credible is 'that you have dwelt upon all worthy books'. It is because Lord Herbert has dwelt upon all worthy books that it is credible that he knows man.