No More Learning

Saintsbury, _Caroline Poets_, ii. 161.

PAGE =251=, ll. 9-18. The source of this simile is probably Lucretius,
_De Rerum Natura_, III. 642-56.

Falciferos memorant currus abscidere membra
Saepe ita de subito permixta caede calentis,
Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
Decidit abscisum, cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
Mobilitate mali non quit sentire dolorem;
Et semel in pugnae studio quod dedita mens est,
Corpore reliquo pugnam caedesque petessit,
Nec tenet amissam laevam cum tegmine saepe
Inter equos abstraxe rotas falcesque rapaces,
Nec cecidisse alius dextram, cum scandit et instat.
Inde alius conatur adempto surgere crure,
Cum digitos agitat propter moribundus humi pes.
Et caput abscisum calido viventeque trunco
Servat humi voltum vitalem oculosque patentis,
Donec reliquias animai reddidit omnes.

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 ([Greek: krasis]), 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.