Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/89

 must confess that I have to take it rather on trust. It wants an effort to suppose that the sense of man's littleness in the Universe could be really driven home by comparing the Creator to a 'multiplied elephant.' If a man were not shocked by the incongruity, he might recognise a true sentiment, which, uttered in a different dialect, may still impress us all at times. But, then, if we strip off the subtleties, we are apt to come upon a commonplace, and at last must confess that a good many of Donne's refinements suggest rather a yawn than a rapture. If, however, we deliberately make the effort, get back as well as we can to the seventeenth century, and try to get up a rapture, we can perhaps understand, though it is difficult quite to sympathise. There are passages enough in which Donne reveals his heart, and the veil of subtlety becomes transparent. Using a comparison generally attributed to Newton, he speaks of the worthlessness of mere human wisdom, and says that men who have followed by this light 'all the ways both of wisdom and of craft, have got no further than to have walked by the side of a tempestuous sea, and to have gathered pebbles and speckled cockle-shells.' There, happily, his faculty for analogies stops,