58 CHAPTER V. DR. DONNE'S "HOSPITAL" AND PRISON." "Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for you OW strangely prone we are to repeat the old question about an afflicted neighbour, "Who did sinthis man, or his parents ?" It may be that our readiness to put the query so often, notwithstanding holy cautions against false interpretations of Divine Providence, sometimes expresses a kind of instinctive homage to God's retributive justice; but it is never safe for the best of us to attempt a judicial decision in the case of a suffering brother. There is but One who knows all that is in man: but One, therefore, who has a right to judge. Yet how easily are the most kind and loving spirits sometimes betrayed into an invasion of their Redeemer's rights! The amiable Walton even-he who so loved the memory of John Donne-ventures to hint that his friend's domestic sufferings might prove "his marriage" to be "the remarkable error of his life:" and, says he, "doubtless it had been attended with a heavy repentance, if God had not blessed them 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." O Isaac Walton! is obedience to that "mutual and cordial affection" which Heaven has ordained as the most holy warrant and bond of matrimony, to be repented of as an error punishable with "bread of sorrow?" and are "dull and low-spirited people" proved right in preferring marriages of mere convenience, by the fact that their expediency secures for them a life of "banquets?" Nay, such love as that of John and Anne Donne had God's own impress upon it; and though their Heavenly Father chastened them, their marriage was the prime joy rather than "the remarkable error" of their life. God gave them for a time "bread of sorrow," it is true; but who shall say how their sorrows served to deepen their mutual joy of love and to bring them into a meetness for the purer communion of Heaven? Was not their "valley of Achor" made their" door of hope"? Nor have their trials been without fruit among those who are akin to them in misfortune. How many a plaintive spirit has felt itself strangely consoled while reading those touching records of home-distresses which were dated at "Mitcham." Had those records never been hallowed to others, they have been hallowed to me. Indeed, I have learnt to love the very place where they were written, and never wander over the scene without feeling as if it had a soothing air for one's spirits in moments of depression. When Donne's home at Pirford was broken up by the death of his friend Sir Francis Woolley, he found a house for himself at Mitcham. My first sight of his chosen village was from the heights of Wimbledon. I had come from the wild undulations of the far-famed "common," where I had been indulging in a rich variety of pleasure; now, letting the soul go forth dreamily towards the distant scenes of Richmond Park; now, bending tenderly over little family groups of Drosera rotundi-folia (round-leafed sundew) in their moist dwellings on the heath; and now, in fancy, watching Roman veterans on garrison duty in the Imperial camp, or lounging at their evening mess. I was standing, by-and-by, on a commanding point, looking out through a break in the foliage of Ridgway upon the glorious landscape, which might help us to realise the joy of a Pisgah-sight of Canaan. In the distance were the hills of Surrey like a heaven-wrought frame stretching around the richly coloured picture; the lower heights, beginning on one hand at Norwood and extending to the Shirley and Addington hills, and still on to Banstead Common and Epsom Downs, on the right; and behind all these, the higher ridge of the great range which crosses the county, guarding and rejoicing over its most beautiful and classic retreats. Within this noble border, and immediately below, there was a wide paradise of grassy plains and wooded undu lations, dotted with villas and homesteads, and gemmed with gardens and fields of fragrant herbs. "What tower is that?" said I to my companion, “rising yonder among the trees?" "That is Mitcham Church." Mitcham The name instantly acted as a charm, throwing over the lovely view a richer loveliness, and endowing the spectator with organs of a more spiritual vision, so that in looking one felt as if the golden thoughts of the genius who once dwelt among those trees were still living and shedding an ethereal light on every feature of the scene where they first found expression. One's soul would fain have taken wing at once, gently to glide down into the leafy retirement where Donne used to have those strange minglings of happy thought and plaintive feeling. I was soon down the hill-side and through the pretty embowered lanes which led to the banks of the Wandle, and along by the old ivy-covered wall which remains to tell of Merton Priory. Merton or Meretun, the town by the pond, is divided from Mitcham by an old bridge on which the pilgrim is tempted to linger and look into the quiet waters until they reflect visions of the successive generations which have lived and passed away from their flowery margin. There would be the deathscene of Cynewulf of Wessex, followed by the bloody struggles between Ethelred, Alfred, and their Danish foes. Then would pass the foundation ceremonies of the old Priory in 1117, with Ethelbert the sheriff figuring as the founder of the first wooden church, and its outstanding parish sanctuary still showing its ancient flint walls. Then would come the royal pomp of Henry the Third's Parliament, and its issue of the famous "Statutes of Merton;" and then the rise of Merton College in 1264, under Walter de Merton, Bishop of Rochester. But such visions were not the only enticements to linger. I would have sauntered in the nursery grounds hard by, which now cover the site of Nelson's dwelling during the intervals of his life ashore; especially by the side of the fish-pond, the only thing left upon which he used to look; and there I would be regaled once more by the talk of the good though quaint old gardener, who moralised on the changes of times and seasons, and helped me, by his native logic and the light of his own transparent simplicity of character, to distinguish between the common notions of greatness as attached to human titles, achievements, and fame, and that Christian childlikeness which the Divine mind esteems as the highest standard of greatness. The old man's homely remarks about looking away from self to Christ, in order to be great in His kingdom or fit for His service, reminded me of a striking passage which once fell from the lips of Donne while preaching in St. Paul's on Christmas Day, 1627: "But," says he, "as a thoughtful man, a pensive, a considerative man, that stands still for awhile, with his eyes fixed upon the ground before his feet, when he casts up his head, hath presently, instantly, the sun or the heavens for his object; he sees not a tree, nor a house, nor a steeple by the way; but as soon as his eye is departed from the earth, where it was long fixed, the next thing he sees is the sun or the heavens: so when Moses had fixed himself long upon the consideration of his own insufficiency for this service, when he took his eye from that low piece of ground, himself, considered as he was then, he fell upon no tree, no house, no steeple, no such consideration as this-God may endow me, improve me, exalt me, enable me, qualify me with faculties fit for this service,—but His first object was that which presented an infallibility with it, Christ Jesus Himself, the Messiah Himself." Now, however, I must needs hasten to Donne's village retreat. Another half-hour, and there is the village green. Who could wonder that finely framed spirits should have chosen a home in that old Surrey village? . There were but few tokens of antiquity in the architecture of either cottages or mansions; but there was still the broad, free, fresh-looking "greens," the "upper" and the "lower" green, the latter still graced with some rows of noble old elms, the venerable relics of that leafy border which once beautified the village "folk-land," and afforded shade to the old and the young who used to sport or doze in the open air of summertide. The church, of course, was to be visited first of all. It was a comparatively modern building, of pleasant proportions and appearance, covering the site on which several earlier sanctuaries had echoed to the prayers of former generations. The one in which Donne had often worshipped was destroyed by lightning about six years after he had joined "the Church of the First-born, written in Heaven." I found an old woman in the church, who remembered the building which followed that of Donne's time, and which was taken down to make way for the present erection. my "I have been here over fifty years," she said, "and since time all the old families have gone; here are some of their tombs along the aisles. One of the eldest you see is that of the Crowleys; here they lie." And lifting the matting, she showed me an old slab in the floor, with an epitaph "To the memory of Sir Ambrose Crowley, and Dame Mary, his wife." Sir Ambrose, as his memorial says, was an "Alderman of unblemished probity and a sincere belief and practice of true Christianity." He figures in the Tatler as Humphry Greenhat." "Did you ever hear anything of Dr. Donne ?" said I. there any story afloat about his residence here?" "Who?" said the old woman, "Dr. Donne ? "Sir "Is No; I never heard of anybody of that name; nobody knows him here." "Do you know anything, then, about where Sir Walter Raleigh used to live ?" 66 "O yes; he used to live in a house that was once up at the end of Whitford Lane. All gone now, sir, like everybody and everything else." "And so," thought I, as I left the old woman to the use of her brush," the courtier, the soldier, the sea captain, the man who offended his sovereign by tainting the breath of young England with tobacco fumes, has left traditional impressions on this village mind, while the seraphic and devout Doctor has no name or memory in the place where some of his greatest trials were suffered, and where many of his im mortal thoughts were conceived and cherished!" He might have been speaking from the pulpit as I passed out of the church, with such living impressiveness did a passsage from one of his sermons occur to me : was. "The ashes of an oak in the chimney," said he, "are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or how large that It tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing; it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldst not, as of a prince whom thou couldst not, look upon, will trouble thine eyes if the wind blew it thither. And when a |