'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:
Laet voor uw aengesicht mijn trouwe tranen vallen,
Want van dat aengensicht ontfangen sy uw' munt,
En rijsen tot de waerd dies' uwe stempel gunt
Bevrucht van uw' gedaent: vrucht van veel' ongevallen,
Maer teekenen van meer, daer ghy valt met den traen,
Die van u swanger was, en beyde wy ontdaen