l. 60. The same thinge. The singular of the MSS. seems to be required by 'you cannot two'. The 's' of the editions is probably due to the final 'e'. But 'things' is the reading of Lec, the MS. representing most closely that from which 1633 was printed.
ll. 71-2. Who hath seene one, &c. 'Who hath seen one, e.g. Twickenham, which your dwelling there makes a Paradise, would fain see you too, as whoever had been in Paradise would not have failed to seek out the Cherubim.' The construction is elliptical. Compare:
P. [286], l. 44.Wee'had had a Saint, have now a holiday.
The Cherubim are specially mentioned (although the Seraphim are the highest order) because they are traditionally the beautiful angels: 'The Spirit of Chastity ... in the likenesse of a faire beautifull Cherubine.' Bacon, New Atlantis (1658), 22 (O.E.D.).
Page 193. To Sr Edward Herbert. at Iulyers.
Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos 'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. Autobiography, ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry. His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, Look to me Faith, to match Sir Ed. Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's Conversations, ed. Laing.) The poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In 1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on Mistress Boulstred.
l. 1. Man is a lumpe, &c. The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed from Plato, The Republic, ix. 588 B-E.
Page 194, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold: 'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca contra napellum.' Benvenuto on Dante, Div. Comm.: Paradiso, i. The plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the O.E.D. quotes Swan, Spec. M. vi. § 4 (1643), 'Hemlock ... is meat to storks and poison to men.' Donne probably uses the word 'chickens' as equivalent to 'young birds', not for the young of the domestic fowl. For the cold of the hemlock see Persius, Sat. v. 145; Ovid, Amores, iii. 7. 13; and Juvenal, Sat. vii. 206, a reference to Socrates' gift from the Athenians of 'gelidas ... cicutas'.
ll. 31-2. Thus man, that might be'his pleasure, &c. These lines are condensed and obscure. The 'his' must mean 'his own'. 'Man who in virtue of that gift of reason which makes him man might be to himself a source of joy, becomes instead, by the abuse of reason, his own rod. Reason which should be the God directing his life becomes the devil which misleads him.' Chambers prints 'His pleasure', 'His rod', referring 'his' to God—which seems hardly possible.
ll. 34-8. wee'are led awry, &c. Chambers's punctuation of this passage is clearly erroneous: