sufferings made their bread of sorrow taste more pleasantly than the
banquets of dull and low-spirited people." It was not for Walton to go in
search of small blemishes in him whom he regarded as the wonder of the
world--him whose grave, mournful friends "strewed ... with an abundance of
curious and costly flowers," as Alexander the Great strewed the grave of
"the famous Achilles." In that grave there was buried for Walton a whole
age magnificent with wit, passion, adventure, piety and beauty. More than
that, the burial of Donne was for him the burial of an inimitable
Christian. He mourns over "that body, which once was a Temple of the Holy
Ghost, and is now become a small quantity of Christian dust," and, as he
mourns, he breaks off with the fervent prophecy, "But I shall see it
reanimated." That is his valediction. If Donne is esteemed three hundred
years after his death less as a great Christian than as a great pagan,
this is because we now look for him in his writings rather than in his
biography, in his poetry rather than in his prose, and in his _Songs and
Sonnets_ and _Elegies_ rather than in his _Divine Poems_. We find, in some
of these, abundant evidence of the existence of a dark angel at odds with
the good angel of Walton's raptures. Donne suffered in his youth all the
temptations of Faust. His thirst was not for salvation but for
experience--experience of the intellect and experience of sensation. He
has left it on record in one of his letters that he was a victim at one
period of "the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic, immoderate desire of
human learning and languages." Faust in his cell can hardly have been a
more insatiate student than Donne. "In the most unsettled days of his
youth," Walton tells us, "his bed was not able to detain him beyond the
hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him
out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study;
though he took great liberty after it." His thoroughness of study may be
judged from the fact that "he left the resultance of 1,400 authors, most
of them abridged and analyzed with his own hand." But we need not go
beyond his poems for proof of the wilderness of learning that he had made
his own. He was versed in medicine and the law as well as in theology. He
subdued astronomy, physiology, and geography to the needs of poetry. Nine
Muses were not enough for him, even though they included Urania. He called
in to their a