Earth as the Lees, and heavie dross of All
(After his kinde) did to the bottom fall:
Contrariwise, the light and nimble Fire
Did through the
crannies
of th'old Heap aspire
Unto the top; and by his nature, light
No less than hot, mounted in sparks upright:
But, lest the Fire (which all the rest imbraces)
Being too near, should burn the Earth to ashes;
As Chosen Umpires, the great All-Creator
Between these Foes placed the Aire and Water:
For, one suffiz'd not their stern strife to end.
John Donne
e. the new mineral
drugs of the Paracelsians.
PAGE =237=, l. 190. _Be more then man, or thou'rt lesse then an Ant._
Compare _To M^r Rowland Woodward_, p. 185, ll. 16-18 and note.
l. 205. _The new Philosophy calls all in doubt, &c._ The philosophy
of Galileo and Copernicus has displaced the earth and discredited
the concentric arrangement of the elements,--earth, water, air,
fire. Norton quotes: 'The fire is an element most hot and dry, pure,
subtill, and so clear as it doth not hinder our sight looking through
the same towards the stars, and is placed next to the Spheare of the
Moon, under the which it is turned about like a celestial Spheare'.
_M. Blundeville His Exercises_, 1594.
When the world was formed from Chaos, then--
Earth as the Lees, and heavie dross of All
(After his kinde) did to the bottom fall:
Contrariwise, the light and nimble Fire
Did through the
crannies
of th'old Heap aspire
Unto the top; and by his nature, light
No less than hot, mounted in sparks upright:
But, lest the Fire (which all the rest imbraces)
Being too near, should burn the Earth to ashes;
As Chosen Umpires, the great All-Creator
Between these Foes placed the Aire and Water:
For, one suffiz'd not their stern strife to end.
Water, as Cozen did the Earth befriend:
Aire for his Kinsman Fire, as firmly deals &c.
Du Bartas, _The second Day of the first Week_
(trans. Joshua Sylvester).
Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, Part 2, Sect. 2, Mem. 3,
tells how the new Astronomers Tycho, Rotman, Kepler, &c. by their new
doctrine of the heavens are 'exploding in the meantime that element of
fire, those fictitious, first watry movers, those heavens I mean above
the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius and many of
the fathers affirm'. They have abolished, that is to say, the fire
which surrounded the air, as that air surrounded the water and
the earth (all below the moon); and they have also abolished the
Crystalline Sphere and the Primum Mobile which were supposed to
surround the sphere of the fixed stars, or the firmament.
PAGE =238=, l. 215. _Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things
forgot._ Donne has probably in mind the effect of the religious wars
in Germany, France, the Low Countries, &c.
