is, as a rule, a miasma-infested swamp.  There are jewels to be found scattered among its rocks and over its surface, and by miners in the dark.  It is richer, indeed, in jewels and precious metals and curious ornaments than in flowers.  The shepherd on the hillside seldom tells his tale uninterrupted.  Strange rites in honour of ancient infernal deities that delight in death are practised in hidden places, and the echo of these reaches him on the sighs of the wind and makes him shudder even as he looks at his beloved.  It is an island with a cemetery smell.  The chief figure who haunts it is a living man in a winding-sheet.  It is, no doubt, Walton’s story of the last days of Donne’s life that makes us, as we read even the sermons and the love-poems, so aware of this ghostly apparition.  Donne, it will be remembered, almost on the eve of his death, dressed himself in a winding-sheet, “tied with knots at his head and feet,” and stood on a wooden urn with his eyes shut, and “with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death-like face,” while a painter made a sketch of him for his funeral monument.  He then had the picture placed at his bedside, to which he summoned his friends and servants in order to bid them farewell.  As he lay awaiting death, he said 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]

    [1] Letters of Horace Walpole; Oxford University Press, 16 vols.,
       96s. Supplementary Letters, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2
       vols., 17s.