volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and sung above the ground.  Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from claustrophobia.  They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them.  In his poems and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images—­the hospital, the prison, and the grave.  Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more terrifyingly than warped ambition.  “Put all the miseries that man is subject to together,” he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant 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 family crest for a new one—­Christ crucified on an anchor.  But he might well have left the snakes writhing about the anchor.  He remained a tempted man to the end.  One wishes that the Sermons threw more light on his later personal life than they do.  But perhaps that is too much to expect of sermons.  There is no form of literature less personal except a leading article.  The preacher