within legitimate bounds, and the phrase illustrates the vein in which we can really imagine Donne to have moved tears as well as wonder. Showing here and there throughout the subtlety and the learning and the controversy, we have glimpses of the ghastly figure which preached his own funeral sermon. Donne, indeed, represents that strangely materialist view of death, the dwelling upon corruption and the physically repulsive, characteristic of the time. Inevitably it leads him into queer speculations, as, for example, into the problem how the body is to be put together after it has been assimilated by a fish or a cannibal, and therefore become the common property of two souls. But beneath all this is the strong sentiment which might now be congenial to pessimism. Donne was a saint in the eyes of his hearers, and a saint of the ascetic type. His conscience is still haunted by remorse, tempted to self-torture and disillusionment with the world. The sensual appetites have been conquered, but at the price of constantly fixing his eyes upon the hideous side of things; he thinks of the treachery and the villainy which underlies the decorous outside of the world, and checks the worship of beauty by thoughts of what will happen to beauty
