Page 259, ll. 275-6. so that there is
(For aught thou know'st) piercing of substances.
'Piercing of substances,' the actual penetration of one substance by another, was the Stoic as opposed to the Aristotelian doctrine of mixture of substance (κρᾶσις), what is now called chemical combination. The Peripatetics held that, while the qualities of the two bodies combined to produce a new quality, the substances remained in juxtaposition. Plotinus devotes the seventh book of the Enneades to the subject; and one of the arguments of the Stoics which he cites resembles Donne's problem: 'Sweat comes out of the human body without dividing it and without the body being pierced with holes.' The pores were apparently unknown. See Bouillet's Enneades de Plotin, I. 243 f. and 488-9, for references.
Page 368. Hymne To God my God, in my sicknesse.
Professor Moore Smith has at the last moment reminded me of a fact, the significance of which should have been discussed in the note on the Divine Poems, that a copy of this poem found (Gosse, Life &c. ii. 279) among the papers of Sir Julius Caesar bears the statement that the verses were written in Donne's 'great sickness in December 1623'. Professor Moore Smith is of opinion that Sir Julius Caesar may have been right and Walton mistaken, and there is a good deal to be said for this view. 'It seems', he says, 'more likely that Walton should have attributed the poem wrongly to Donne's last illness, than that the MS. copy should antedate it by seven years.' In 1640 Walton simply referred it to his deathbed; the precise date was given in 1658. Moreover the date 1623 seems to Professor Moore Smith confirmed by a letter to Sir Robert Ker (later Lord Ancrum) in 1624 (Gosse, Life &c. ii. 191), in which Donne writes, 'If a flat map be but pasted upon a round globe the farthest east and the farthest west meet and are all one.'
On the other hand, Walton's final date is very precise, and was probably given to him by King. If the poem was written at the same time as that 'to God the Father', why did it not pass into wider circulation? Stowe MS. 961 is the only collection in which I have found it. The use of the simile in the letter to Ker is not so conclusive as it seems. In that same letter Donne says, 'Sir, I took up this paper to write a letter; but my imagination was full of a sermon before, for I write but a few hours before I am to preach.' Now I have in my note cited this simile from an undated sermon on one of the Penitentiary Psalms. This, not the poem, may have been the occasion of its repetition in this letter. Donne is very prone to repeat a favourite figure—inundation, the king's stamped face &c. It is quite likely that the poem was the last, not the first, occasion on which he used the flat map. Note that the other chief figure in the poem, the straits which lead to the Pacific Sea, was used in a sermon (see note) dated February 12, 1629.
The figure of the flat map is not used, as one might expect, in the section of the Devotions headed The Patient takes his bed, but the last line of the poem is recalled by some words there: 'and therefore am I cast downe, that I might not be cast away.'
Walton's dates are often inaccurate, but here the balance of the evidence seems to me in his favour. As Mr. Gosse says, Sir Julius Caesar may have confounded this hymn with 'Wilt thou forgive'. In re-reading the Devotions with Professor Moore Smith's statement in view I have come on two other points of interest. Donne's views on the immortality of the soul (see II. pp. [160]-2) are very clearly stated: 'That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God ... only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not thretned with this annihilation. All other things are; even Angels, even our soules; they move upon the same Poles, they bend to the same Center; and if they were not made immortall by preservation, their Nature could not keep them from sinking to this center, Annihilation' (pp. 216-17).
The difficult line in the sonnet Resurrection (p. [321], l. 8) is perhaps illuminated by pp. [206]-8, where Donne speaks of 'thy first booke, the booke of life', 'thy second book, the booke of Nature,' and closes a further list with 'to those, the booke with seven seals, which only the Lamb which was slain, was found worthy to open; which, I hope, it shal not disagree with the measure of thy blessed spirit, to interpret, the promulgation of their pardon, and righteousnes, who are washed in the blood of the Lamb'. This is possibly the 'little booke' of the sonnet, perhaps changed by Donne to 'life-book' to simplify the reference. But the two are not the same.