t, I
cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of
to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a
light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my
brain troubles me in my prayer.

If Donne had written much prose in this kind, his _Sermons_ would be as
famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the
Apostles.

Even as it is, there is no other Elizabethan man of letters whose
personality is an island with a crooked shore, inviting us into a thousand
bays and creeks and river-mouths, to the same degree as the personality
that expressed itself in the poems, sermons, and life of John Donne. It is
a mysterious and at times repellent island. It lies only intermittently in
the sun. A fog hangs around its coast, and at the base of its most radiant
mountain-tops there is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp. There are
jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by
miners in the dark. It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals
and curious ornaments than in flowers. The shepherd on the hillside seldom
tells his tale uninterrupted. Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal
deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo
of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even
as he looks at his beloved. It is an island with a cemetery smell. The
chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet. It is, no
doubt, Walton's story of the last days of Donne's life that makes us, as
we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly
apparition. Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death,
dressed himself in a winding-sheet, "tied with knots at his head and
feet," and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and "with so much of
the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face,"
while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument. He then had
the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and
servants in order to bid them farewell. As he lay awaiting death, he said
characteristically, "I were miserable if I might not die," and then
repeatedly, in a faint voice, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done." At the
very end he lost his speech, and "as his soul ascended and his last breath
departed from him he closed his eyes, and then disposed his hands and body
into such a posture as