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, though he knows not why he travels. He loves,
though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic,
immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it
was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596
and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he
himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to
do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of
storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes:

Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.

In these lines we get a glimpse of the Donne that has attracted most
interest in recent years--the Donne who experienced more variously than
any other poet of his time "the queasy pain of being beloved and loving."
Donne was curious of adventures of many kinds, but in nothing more than in
love. As a youth he leaves the impression of having been an Odysseus of