anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_;
"sickness is more than all .... In poverty I lack but other things; in
banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton
declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had
probably the seeds of many diseases. In some of his letters he dwells
miserably on the symptoms of his illnesses. At one time, his sickness
"hath so much of a cramp that it wrests the sinews, so much of tetane that
it withdraws and pulls the mouth, and so much of the gout ... that it is
not like to be cured.... I shall," he adds, "be in this world, like a
porter in a great house, but seldomest abroad; I shall have many things to
make me weary, and yet not get leave to be gone." Even after his
conversion he felt drawn to a morbid insistence on the details of his
ill-health. Those amazing records which he wrote while lying ill in bed in
October, 1623, give us a realistic study of a sick-bed and its
circumstances, the gloom of which is hardly even lightened by his odd
account of the disappearance of his sense of taste: "My taste is not gone
away, but gone up to sit at David's table; my stomach is not gone, but
gone upwards toward the Supper of the Lamb." "I am mine own ghost," he
cries, "and rather affright my beholders than interest them.... Miserable
and inhuman fortune, when I must practise my lying in the grave by lying
still."

It does not surprise one to learn that a man thus assailed by wretchedness
and given to looking in the mirror of his own bodily corruptions was often
tempted, by "a sickly inclination," to commit suicide, and that he even
wrote, though he did not dare to publish, an apology for suicide on
religious grounds, his famous and little-read _Biathanatos_. The family
crest of the Donnes was a sheaf of snakes, and these symbolize well enough
the brood of temptations that twisted about in this unfortunate
Christian's bosom. Donne, in the days of his salvation, abandoned the