Page 240, l. 286. a Tenarif, or higher hill. 'Tenarif' is the 1611 spelling, 'Tenarus' that of 1633-69. Donne speaks of 'Tenarus' elsewhere, but it is not the same place.
It is not probable that Donne ever saw the Peak of Teneriffe, although biographers speak of this line as a descriptive touch drawn from memory. The Canary Isles are below the 30th degree of latitude. The fleet that made the Islands Exhibition was never much if at all further south than 43 degrees. After coasting off Corunna 43° N. 8° W., and some leagues south of that port, the fleet struck straight across to the Azores, 37° N. 25° W. Donne was somewhat nearer in the previous year when he was at Cadiz, 36° N. 6° W., but too far off to descry the Peak. His description, though vivid, is 'metaphysical', like that of Hell which follows: 'The Pike of Teneriff, how high is it? 79 miles or 52, as Patricius holds, or 9 as Snellius demonstrates in his Eratosthenes'. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.
On the other side, Satan, alarm'd,
Collecting all his might, dilated stood,
Like Teneriff or Atlas, unremov'd.
Milton, Par. Lost, iv. 985-7.
ll. 295 f. If under all, a Vault infernall bee, &c. Hell, according to mediaeval philosophy, was in the middle of the earth. 'If this be true,' says Donne, 'and if at the same time the Sea is in places bottomless, then the earth is neither solid nor round. We use these words only approximately. But you may hold, on the other hand, that the deepest seas we know are but pock-holes, the highest hills but warts, on the face of the solid earth. Well, even in that case you must admit that in the moral sphere at any rate the world's proportion is disfigured by the want of all proportioning of reward and punishment to conduct.' The sudden transition from the physical to the moral sphere is very disconcerting. Compare: 'Or is it the place of hell, as Virgil in his Aeneides, Plato, Lucian, Dante, and others poetically describe it, and as many of our divines think. In good earnest, Antony Rusca, one of the society of that Ambrosian college in Millan, in his great volume de Inferno, lib. i, cap. 47, is stiffe in this tenent.... Whatsoever philosophers write (saith Surius) there be certaine mouthes of Hell, and places appointed for the punishment of mens souls, as at Hecla in Island, where the ghosts of dead men are familiarly seen, and sometimes talk with the living. God would have such visible places, that mortal men might be certainly informed, that there be such punishments after death, and learn hence to fear God,' &c. Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, Part 2, Sec. 2, Mem. 3.
ll. 296-8. Which sure is spacious, &c. 'Franciscus Ribera will have hell a materiall and locall fire in the centre of the earth, 200 Italian miles in diameter, as he defines it out of those words Exivit sanguis de terra ... per stadia mille sexcenta, &c. But Lessius (lib. 13, de moribus divinis, cap. 24) will have this locall hell far less, one Dutch mile in diameter, all filled with fire and brimstone; because, as he there demonstrates, that space, cubically multiplied, will make a sphere able to hold eight hundred thousand millions of damned bodies (allowing each body six foot square); which will abundantly suffice, 'cum certum sit, inquit, facta subductione, non futuros centies mille milliones damnandorum.' Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, ut sup. Eschatology was the 'dismal science' of those days and was studied with astonishing gusto and acumen. 'For as one Author, who is afraid of admitting too great a hollownesse in the Earth, lest then the Earth might not be said to be solid, pronounces that Hell cannot possibly be above three thousand miles in compasse, (and then one of the torments of Hell will be the throng, for their bodies must be there in their dimensions, as well as their soules) so when the Schoole-men come to measure the house in heaven (as they will measure it, and the Master, God, and all his Attributes, and tell us how Allmighty, and how Infinite he is) they pronounce that every soule in that house shall have more roome to it selfe, then all this world is.' Sermons 80. 73. 747. The reference in the margin is to Munster.
l. 311. that Ancient, &c. 'Many erroneous opinions are about the essence and originall of it' (i.e. the rational soul), 'whether it be fire, as Zeno held; harmony, as Aristoxenus; number, as Xenocrates,' &c. Burton, Anat. of Melancholy, Part i, Sec. 1, Mem. 2, Subsec. 9. Probably Donne has the same 'Ancient' in view. It is from Cicero (Tusc. Disp. i. 10) that we learn that Aristoxenus held the soul to be a harmony of the body. Though a Peripatetic, Aristoxenus lived in close communion with the latest Pythagoreans, and the doctrine is attributed to Pythagoras as a consequence of his theory of numbers. Simmias, the disciple of the Pythagorean Philolaus, maintains the doctrine in Plato's Phaedo, and Socrates criticizes it. Aristotle states and examines it in the De Anima, 407b. 30. Two classes of thinkers, Bouillet says (Plotinus, Fourth Ennead, Seventh Book, note), regarded the soul as a harmony, doctors as Hippocrates and Galen, who considered it a harmony of the four elements—the hot, the cold, the dry and the moist (as the definition of health Donne refers to this more than once, e.g. The good-morrow, l. 19, and The Second Anniversary, ll. 130 f.); and musicians like Aristoxenus, who compared the soul to the harmony of the lyre. Donne leaves the sense in which he uses the word quite vague; but l. 321 suggests the medical sense.
l. 312. at next. This common Anglo-Saxon construction is very rare in later English. The O.E.D. cites no instance later than 1449, Pecock's Repression. The instance cited there is prepositional in character rather than adverbial: 'Immediatli at next to the now bifore alleggid text of Peter this proces folewith.' Donne's use seems to correspond exactly to the Anglo-Saxon: 'Johannes ða ofhreow þaēre mēden and ðaera licmanna drēorignysse, and āstrehte his licaman tō eorðan on langsumum gebēde, and ða aet nēxtan āras, and eft upahafenum handum langlice baed.' Aelfric (Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader, 1894, p. 67). But 'at next' in the poem possibly does not mean simply 'next', but 'immediately', i.e. 'the first thing he said would have been ...'