Essays in Divinity

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I SOME NOTICE ot THE AUTHOR AND HIS WRITINGS. JOHN DONNE, the writer of .the Essays contained in this volume, lived in an age more fruitful in great men and stirring events than the world has perhaps ever seen, from the times of Pericles to the days of Queen Victoria. He was born in 1573?the year after the...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: I SOME NOTICE ot THE AUTHOR AND HIS WRITINGS. JOHN DONNE, the writer of .the Essays contained in this volume, lived in an age more fruitful in great men and stirring events than the world has perhaps ever seen, from the times of Pericles to the days of Queen Victoria. He was born in 1573?the year after the massacre of St. Bartholomew; he died w 1631, the year after the battle of Liitzen. where Gustavus Adolphus fell. In his childhood Camoens fetched his last sigh in Portugal, ?the poet who had laid the only firm foundation for his country's literature, condemned to die in penury, hardly finding for his very corpse its last garment?a shroud. In his boyhood, Sir Philip Sidney wrote the Arcadia, and he was still in his teens when that gallant hero put away the cup of water from his own parched lips to slake the thirst of the bleeding trooper lying by his side. It was in his youth too, that Raleigh and Drake sailed out to meet the Invincible Armada, when Queen Elizabeth showed herself b chapter{{Section 4worthy to be a queen of England, undaunted in the sight of danger which might have made, and which did make, many a stout heart throb. Before he reached man's estate, he had travelled over many of the countries of Europe and become proficient in their languages, and it is far from improbable that he heard Galileo lecture at Pisa, while Cervantes was grimly offering his Don Quixotte to his reluctant countrymen, and poor Tasso moaning over his sorrows in a madhouse. While Hooker was sending forth the Ecclesiastical Polity book by book?while Spenser was writing the Faery Queen?while Shakespeare was meeting Beaumont and Fletcher at the Mermaid or playing Ghost in his own Hamlet, Donne was courting the muses, securing for himself some fame as a poet, and ...