The floating Moone would shipwracke there, and sinke;
he sails to heaven, the Pacific Ocean, the Fortunate Islands, by the North-West Passage, or through the Straits of Magellan.
In attempting to illustrate these and other aspects of Donne's erudition as displayed in his poetry it has been my endeavour not so much to trace them to their remote sources as to discover the form in which he was familiar with a doctrine or a theory. Next to his own works, therefore, I have had recourse to contemporary or but slightly later works, as Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica. I have made constant use of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, using the edition in Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus (1845). By Professor Picavet my attention was called to Bouillet's translation of Plotinus's Enneads with ample notes on the analogies to and developments of Neo-Platonic thought in the Schoolmen. I have also used Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen, on Plotinus, and Harnack's History of Dogma. Throughout, my effort has been rather to justify, elucidate, and suggest, than to accumulate parallels.
*** In the following notes the LXXX Sermons &c. (1640), Fifty Sermons &c. (1649), and XXVI Sermons &c. (1669/70) are referred to thus:—80. 19. 189, i.e. the LXXX Sermons, the nineteenth sermon, page 189. References to page and line simply of the poems are to the first volume of this edition. References to the second are given thus, II. p. 249.
THE PRINTER TO &c.
See Text and Canon of Donne's Poems, p. [lix].
Page 1, ll. 17-18. it would have come to us from beyond the Seas: e.g. from Holland.
ll. 19-20. My charge and pains in procuring of it: A significant statement as to the source of the edition.