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 required not the least alteration by those that
came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral
monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great
Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his
fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last
fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a
fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight
days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently
egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse:

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I 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.

Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but
none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places,
now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the
first man in a new found land.




V.--HORACE WALPOLE[1]