id Galen and Copernicus. He did not go to the hills and the
springs for his images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the
library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works
of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London
may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime. I do not
think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to
Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later.
The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with
interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson. Jonson's Catholicism may have
been a link between them. But, more important than that, Jonson was, like
Donne himself, an inflamed pedant. For each of them learning was the
necessary robe of genius. Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the
classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to
a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. It was, I think, because
Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the
proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that
he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for
Protestantism. He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and
passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he
first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious
convert. He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had
liberated from dogma-worship. Nor did he ever lose this rationalist
tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned
the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one
sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such
wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines:

To adore or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go;
And what the hill's suddenness resists win so.

This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a
theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from
ardent faith.

It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man
setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and
experience. He travels