ll. 35-6. Make your returne home gracious; and bestow
This life on that; so make one life of two.
'Make a present of this life to the next, by living now as you will live then; and so make this life and the next one'—or, as another poet puts it:
And so make life, death, and that vast forever
One grand, sweet song.
This I take to be Donne's meaning. The 'This' of 1635-69 and the MSS., which Chambers also has adopted, seems required by the antithesis. If one recalls that 'this' is very commonly written 'thys', and that final 's' is little more than a tail, it is easy to account for 'Thy' in 1633. The meaning too is not clear at a glance, and 'Thy' might seem to an editor to make it easier. The thought is much the same as in the Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, p. [279].
And I (though with paine)
Lessen our losse, to magnifie thy gaine
Of triumph, when I say, It was more fit,
That all men should lacke thee, then thou lack it.