'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.