Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva
La man che obbedisce all' intelletto.
Page 333, l. 47. So with harsh, &c. Chambers, I do not know why, punctuates this line:
So with harsh, hard, sour, stinking; cross the rest;
This disguises the connexion of 'cross' with its adverbial qualifications. The meaning is that as we cross the eye by making it contemplate 'bad objects' so we must cross the rest, i.e. the other senses, with harsh (the ear), hard (touch), sour (the taste), and stinking (the sense of smell). The asceticism of Donne in his later life is strikingly evidenced in such lines as these.
l. 48. I have made an emendation here which seems to me to combine happily the text of 1633 and that of the later editions. It seems to me that 1633 has dropped 'all', 1635-69 have dropped 'call'. I thought the line as I give it was in O'F, but found on inquiry I had misread the collation. I should withdraw it, but cannot find it in my heart to do so.
l. 52. Points downewards. I think the MS. reading is probably right, because (1) 'Pants' is the same as 'hath palpitation'; (2) Donne alludes to the anatomy of the heart, in the same terms, in the Essayes in Divinity, p. 74 (ed. Jessop, 1855): 'O Man, which art said to be the epilogue, and compendium of all this world, and the Hymen and matrimonial knot of eternal and mortal things ... and was made by God's hands, not His commandment; and hast thy head erected to heaven, and all others to the centre, that yet only thy heart of all others points downward, and only trembles.'
The reference in each case is to the anatomy of the day: 'The figure of it, as Hippocrates saith in his Booke de Corde is Pyramidall, or rather turbinated and somewhat answering to the proportion of a Pine Apple, because a man is broad and short chested. For the Basis above is large and circular but not exactly round, and after it by degrees endeth in a cone or dull and blunt round point ... His lower part is called the Vertex or top, Mucro or point, the Cone, the heighth of the heart. Hippocrates calleth it the taile which Galen saith ... is the basest part, as the Basis is the noblest.' Helkiah Crooke: ΜΙΚΡΟΚΟΣΜΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ, A Description of the Body of Man, &c. (1631), Book I, chap. ii, Of the Heart.
'The heart therefore is called καρδία ἀπὸ τοῦ κερδαίνεσθαι, (sic. i.e. κραδαίνεσθαι) which signifieth to beate because it is perpetually moved from the ingate to the outgate of life.' Ibid., Book VII, The Preface.