books, and dear-bought experience.”  It is true that he quotes Donne’s own confession of the irregularities of his early life.  But he counts them of no significance.  He also utters a sober reproof of Donne’s secret marriage as “the remarkable error of his life.”  But how little he condemned it in his heart is clear when he goes on to tell us that God blessed Donne and his wife “with so mutual and cordial affections, as in the midst of their 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 aid Galen and Copernicus.  He did not go to the hills and the springs for his