The description of the departure and the storm which followed was probably written in Plymouth, whither the ships had to put back, and whence they sailed again about a month later; therefore in July-August, 1597. 'We imbarked our Army, and set sayle about the ninth of July, and for two dayes space were accompanied with a faire leading North-easterly wind.' (Mildly it kist our sailes, &c.)...... 'Wee now being in this faire course, some sixtie leagues onwards our journey with our whole Fleet together, there suddenly arose a fierce and tempestuous storme full in our teethe, continuing for foure dayes with so great violence, as that now everyone was inforced rather to looke to his own safetie, and with a low saile to serve the Seas, then to beate it up against the stormy windes to keep together, or to follow the directions for the places of meeting.' A larger Relation of the said Iland Voyage written by Sir Arthur Gorges, &c. Purchas his Pilgrimes. Glasg. mcmvii. While at Plymouth Donne wrote a prose letter, to whom is not clear, preserved in the Burley Commonplace Book. There he speaks of 'so very bad wether yt even some of ye mariners have been drawen to think it were not altogether amiss to pray, and myself heard one of them say, God help us'.
To Mr. Christopher Brooke. Donne's intimate friend and chamber-fellow at Lincoln's Inn. He was Donne's chief abetter in his secret marriage, his younger brother Samuel performing the ceremony. They were the sons of Robert Brooke, Alderman of and once M.P. for York, and his wife Jane Maltby. The Alderman had other sons who followed in his footsteps and figure among the Freemen of York, but Christopher and Samuel earned a wider reputation. At Lincoln's Inn, Christopher wrote verses and cultivated the society of the wits. Wood mentions as his friends and admirers Selden and Jonson, Drayton and Browne, Wither and Davies of Hereford. Browne sings his praises in the second song of the second book of Britannia's Pastorals, and in The Shepherds Pipe (1614) urges him to sing a higher strain. His poems, which have been collected and edited by the late Dr. Grosart, include an Elegy on Prince Henry, and a long poem of no merit, The Ghost of Richard the Third (Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, vol. iv, 1872). In 1614 he became a bencher and Summer Reader at Lincoln's Inn. He died February 7, 162⅞.
l. 4. By Hilliard drawne. Nicholas Hilliard (1537-1619), the first English miniature painter. He was goldsmith, carver, and limner to Queen Elizabeth, and engraved her second great seal in 1586. He drew a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, at eighteen, and executed miniatures of many contemporaries. He also wrote a treatise on miniature painting. Mr. Laurence Binyon thinks it is quite possible that the miniature from which Marshall, about 1635, engraved the portrait of Donne as a young man, was by Hilliard. It is, he says, quite in his style.
l. 13. From out her pregnant intrailes. The ancients attributed winds to the effect of exhalations from the earth. Seneca, Quaestiones Naturales, v. 4, discusses various causes but mentions this first: 'Sometimes the earth herself emits a great quantity of air, which she breathes out of her hidden recesses ... A suggestion has been made which I cannot make up my mind to believe, and yet I cannot pass over without mention. In our bodies food produces flatulence, the emission of which causes great offence to ones nasal susceptibilities; sometimes a report accompanies the relief of the stomach, sometimes there is more polite smothering of it. In like manner it is supposed the great frame of things when assimilating its nourishment emits air. It is a lucky thing for us that nature's digestion is good, else we might apprehend some less agreeable consequences.' (Q. N. translated by John Clarke, with notes by Sir Archibald Geikie, 1910.) These exhalations, according to one view, mounting up were driven back by the violence of the stars, or by inability to pass the frozen middle region of the air—hence commotions. (Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 38, 45, 47, 48.) This explains Donne's 'middle marble room', where 'marble' may mean 'hard', or possibly 'blue' referring to the colour of the heavens. It is so used by Studley in his translations of Seneca's tragedies: 'Whereas the marble sea doth fleete,' Hipp. i. 25; 'When marble skies no filthy fog doth dim,' Herc. Oet. ii. 8; 'The monstrous hags of marble seas' (monstra caerulei maris), Hipp. v. 5, I owe this suggestion to Miss Evelyn Spearing (The Elizabethan 'Tenne Tragedies of Seneca'. Mod. Lang. Review, iv. 4). But the peripatetic view was that the heavens were made of hard, solid, though transparent, concentric spheres: 'Tycho will have two distinct matters of heaven and ayre; but to say truth, with some small modifications, they' (i.e. Tycho Brahe and Christopher Rotman) 'have one and the self same opinion about the essence and matter of heavens; that it is not hard and impenetrable, as Peripateticks hold, transparent, of a quinta essentia, but that it is penetrable and soft as the ayre itself is, and that the planets move in it', (according to the older view each was fixed in its sphere) 'as birds in the ayre, fishes in the sea.' Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, part ii, sect. 2, Men. 3.
'Wind', says Donne elsewhere, 'is a mixt Meteor, to the making whereof, diverse occasions concurre with exhalations.' Sermons 80. 31. 305.
The movement which Donne has in view is described by Du Bartas:
If heav'ns bright torches, from earth's Kidneys, sup
Som somwhat dry and heatfull Vapours up,
Th' ambitious lightning of their nimble Fire
Would suddenly neer th' Azure Cirques aspire: