) This explains
Donne's 'middle marble room', where 'marble' may mean 'hard', or
_possibly_ 'blue' referring to the colour of the heavens.
Donne's 'middle marble room', where 'marble' may mean 'hard', or
_possibly_ 'blue' referring to the colour of the heavens.
John Donne
4, discusses various causes but mentions
this first: 'Sometimes the earth herself emits a great quantity of
air, which she breathes out of her hidden recesses . . . A suggestion
has been made which I cannot make up my mind to believe, and yet
I cannot pass over without mention. In our bodies food produces
flatulence, the emission of which causes great offence to ones nasal
susceptibilities; sometimes a report accompanies the relief of the
stomach, sometimes there is more polite smothering of it. In like
manner it is supposed the great frame of things when assimilating
its nourishment emits air. It is a lucky thing for us that nature's
digestion is good, else we might apprehend some less agreeable
consequences. ' (_Q. N. translated by John Clarke, with notes by Sir
Archibald Geikie_, 1910. ) These exhalations, according to one view,
mounting up were driven back by the violence of the stars, or
by inability to pass the frozen middle region of the air--hence
commotions. (Pliny, _Nat. Hist. _ ii. 38, 45, 47, 48.
) This explains
Donne's 'middle marble room', where 'marble' may mean 'hard', or
_possibly_ 'blue' referring to the colour of the heavens. It is so
used by Studley in his translations of Seneca's tragedies: 'Whereas
the marble sea doth fleete,' _Hipp. _ i. 25; 'When marble skies no
filthy fog doth dim,' _Herc. Oet. _ ii. 8; 'The monstrous hags of
marble seas' (monstra caerulei maris), _Hipp. _ v. 5, I owe this
suggestion to Miss Evelyn Spearing (_The Elizabethan 'Tenne Tragedies
of Seneca'. _ _Mod. Lang. Review_, iv. 4). But the peripatetic view
was that the heavens were made of hard, solid, though transparent,
concentric spheres: 'Tycho will have two distinct matters of heaven
and ayre; but to say truth, with some small modifications, they'
(i. e. Tycho Brahe and Christopher Rotman) 'have one and the self same
opinion about the essence and matter of heavens; that it is not hard
and impenetrable, as Peripateticks hold, transparent, of a _quinta
essentia_, but that it is penetrable and soft as the ayre itself is,
and that the planets move in it', (according to the older view each
was fixed in its sphere) 'as birds in the ayre, fishes in the sea.
this first: 'Sometimes the earth herself emits a great quantity of
air, which she breathes out of her hidden recesses . . . A suggestion
has been made which I cannot make up my mind to believe, and yet
I cannot pass over without mention. In our bodies food produces
flatulence, the emission of which causes great offence to ones nasal
susceptibilities; sometimes a report accompanies the relief of the
stomach, sometimes there is more polite smothering of it. In like
manner it is supposed the great frame of things when assimilating
its nourishment emits air. It is a lucky thing for us that nature's
digestion is good, else we might apprehend some less agreeable
consequences. ' (_Q. N. translated by John Clarke, with notes by Sir
Archibald Geikie_, 1910. ) These exhalations, according to one view,
mounting up were driven back by the violence of the stars, or
by inability to pass the frozen middle region of the air--hence
commotions. (Pliny, _Nat. Hist. _ ii. 38, 45, 47, 48.
) This explains
Donne's 'middle marble room', where 'marble' may mean 'hard', or
_possibly_ 'blue' referring to the colour of the heavens. It is so
used by Studley in his translations of Seneca's tragedies: 'Whereas
the marble sea doth fleete,' _Hipp. _ i. 25; 'When marble skies no
filthy fog doth dim,' _Herc. Oet. _ ii. 8; 'The monstrous hags of
marble seas' (monstra caerulei maris), _Hipp. _ v. 5, I owe this
suggestion to Miss Evelyn Spearing (_The Elizabethan 'Tenne Tragedies
of Seneca'. _ _Mod. Lang. Review_, iv. 4). But the peripatetic view
was that the heavens were made of hard, solid, though transparent,
concentric spheres: 'Tycho will have two distinct matters of heaven
and ayre; but to say truth, with some small modifications, they'
(i. e. Tycho Brahe and Christopher Rotman) 'have one and the self same
opinion about the essence and matter of heavens; that it is not hard
and impenetrable, as Peripateticks hold, transparent, of a _quinta
essentia_, but that it is penetrable and soft as the ayre itself is,
and that the planets move in it', (according to the older view each
was fixed in its sphere) 'as birds in the ayre, fishes in the sea.
