images, but to the laboratory and the library, and in the library the books that he consulted to the greatest effect were the works of men of science and learning, not of the great poets with whom London may almost be said to have been peopled during his lifetime.  I do not think his verse or correspondence contains a single reference to Shakespeare, whose contemporary he was, being born only nine years later.  The only great Elizabethan poet whom he seems to have regarded with interest and even friendship was Ben Jonson.  Jonson’s Catholicism may have been a link between them.  But, more important than that, Jonson was, like Donne himself, an inflamed pedant.  For each of them learning was the necessary robe of genius.  Jonson, it is true, was a pedant of the classics, Donne of the speculative sciences; but both of them alike ate to a surfeit of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.  It was, I think, because Donne was to so great a degree a pagan of the Renaissance, loving the proud things of the intellect more than the treasures of the humble, that he found it easy to abandon the Catholicism of his family for Protestantism.  He undoubtedly became in later life a convinced and passionate Christian of the Protestant faith, but at the time when he first changed his religion he had none of the fanaticism of the pious convert.  He wrote in an early satire as a man whom the intellect had liberated from dogma-worship.  Nor did he ever lose this rationalist tolerance.  “You know,” he once wrote to a friend, “I have never imprisoned the word religion....  They” (the churches) “are all virtual beams of one sun.”  Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines: 

  To adore or scorn an image, or protest,
  May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
  To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
  To sleep or run wrong is.  On a huge hill,
  Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
  Reach her, about must and about must go;
  And what the hill’s suddenness resists win so.

This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian.  It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith.

It is all in keeping with one’s impression of the young Donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and experience.  He travels, though he knows not why he travels.  He loves, though he knows not why he loves.  He must escape from that “hydroptic, immoderate” thirst of experience by yielding to it.  One fancies that it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores.  Or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it.  In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes: