God's 'last, and lasting'st peece, a song' is of course Moses' song in Deuteronomy xxxii: 'Give ear, O ye heavens, and I will speak,' &c.
l. 467. Such an opinion (in due measure) made, &c. The bracket of 1611 makes the sense less ambiguous than the commas of 1633:
Such an opinion, in due measure, made.
According to the habits of old punctuation, 'in due measure' thus comma'd off might be an adjunct of 'made me ... invade'. The bracket shows that the phrase goes with 'opinion'. 'Such an opinion (with all due reverence spoken),' &c. Donne finds that he is attributing to himself the same thoughts as God.
A Funerall Elegie.
l. 2. to confine her in a marble chest. The 'Funerall Elegie' was probably the first composed of these poems. Elizabeth Drury's parents erected over her a very elaborate marble tomb.
Page 246, l. 41. the Affrique Niger. Grosart comments on this: 'A peculiarity generally given to the Nile; and here perhaps not spoken of our Niger, but of the Nile before it is so called, when, according to Pliny (N. H. v. 9), after having twice been underground, and the second time for twenty days' journey, it issues at the spring Nigris.' Probably Donne had been reading 'A Geographical Historie of Africa written in Arabicke by John Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought up in Barbarie ... Translated and collected by Iohn Porie, late of Gonevill and Caius College in Cambridge, 1600.' Of the Niger he says: 'This land of Negros hath a mighty river, which taking his name of the region is called Niger: this river taketh his originall from the east out of a certain desert called by the foresaide Negros Sen ... Our Cosmographers affirme that the said river of Niger is derived out of Nilus, which they imagine for some certaine space to be swallowed up of the earth, and yet at last to burst forth into such a lake as is before mentioned.' Pory is mentioned occasionally in Donne's correspondence.
Page 247, l. 50. An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubin. See Elegy XI, ll. 77-8 and note. Donne, like Shakespeare, uses 'Cherubin' as a singular. There can be no doubt that the lines in Macbeth, I. vii. 21-3, should read:
And pity, like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heavens cherubins horsed