idney kept good
heed that even that should serve the end in view; in his play with ideas,
Dr. John Donne, so far from serving the end, sometimes obscures it almost
hopelessly: the hart escapes while he follows the squirrels and weasels
and bats. It is not surprising that, their author being so inartistic
with regard to their object, his verses themselves should be harsh and
unmusical beyond the worst that one would imagine fit to be called verse.
He enjoys the unenviable distinction of having no rival in ruggedness of
metric movement and associated sounds. This is clearly the result of
indifference; an indifference, however, which grows very strange to us
when we find that he _can_ write a lovely verse and even an exquisite
stanza.

Greatly for its own sake, partly for the sake of illustration, I quote a
poem containing at once his best and his worst, the result being such an
incongruity that we wonder whether it might not be called his best _and_
his worst, because we cannot determine which. He calls it _Hymn to God,
my God, in my Sickness_. The first stanza is worthy of George Herbert in
his best mood.

Since I am coming to that holy room,
Where with the choir of saints for evermore
I shall be made thy music, as I come
I tune the instrument here at the door,
And what I must do then, think here before.

To recognize its beauty, leaving aside the depth and truth of the phrase,
"Where I shall be made thy music," we must recall the custom of those
days to send out for "a noise of musicians." Hence he imagines that he
has been summoned as one of a band already gone in to play before the
king of "The High Countries:" he is now at the door, where he is
listening to catch the tone, that he may have his instrument tuned and
ready before he enters. But with what a jar the next stanza breaks on
heart, mind, and ear!

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I[72] their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
_Per fretum febris_--by these straits to die;--

Here, in the midst of comparing himself to a map, and his physicians to
cosmographers consulting the map, he changes without warning into a
navigator whom they are trying to follow upon the map as he passes
through certain straits--namely, those of the fever--towards his
south-west discovery, Death. Grotesque as this is, the absurdity deepens
in the end of the