Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel

Master John Donne was born in London, in the year 1573, of good and virtuous parents: and, though his own learning and other multiplied merits may justly appear sufficient to di...

I return from my account of the vision, to tell the reader, that both before Mr. Donne's going into France, at his being there, and after his return, many of the nobility and ot...

"Since I am coming to that holy room, Where, with Thy Choir of Saints, for evermore I shall be made Thy music, as I come I tune my instrument here at the door, And, what I must...

And if that young, and his now dying picture were at this time set together, every beholder might say, "Lord! how much is Dr. Donne already changed, before he is changed!" And t...

David professes himself a dead dog to his king Saul,[5] and so doth Mephibosheth to his king David,[6] and yet David speaks to Saul, and Mephibosheth to David. No man is so litt...

O most mighty and most merciful God, who art so the God of health and strength, as that without thee all health is but the fuel, and all strength but the bellows of sin; behold...

My God, my God, I find in thy book that fear is a stifling spirit, a spirit of suffocation; that _Ishbosheth could not speak, nor reply in his own defence to Abner, because he w...

Still when we return to that meditation that man is a world, we find new discoveries. Let him be a world, and himself will be the land, and misery the sea. His misery (for miser...

This is nature's nest of boxes: the heavens contain the earth; the earth, cities; cities, men. And all these are concentric; the common centre to them all is decay, ruin; only t...

O eternal and most gracious God, who in thy upper house, the heavens, though there be many mansions, yet art alike and equally in every mansion; but here in thy lower house, tho...

I would not make man worse than he is, nor his condition more miserable than it is. But could I though I would? As a man cannot flatter God, nor overpraise him, so a man cannot...

We have a convenient author,[234] who writ a discourse of bells when he was prisoner in Turkey. How would he have enlarged himself if he had been my fellow-prisoner in this sick...

The bell rings out, the pulse thereof is changed; the tolling was a faint and intermitting pulse, upon one side; this stronger, and argues more and better life. His soul is gone...

My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou...

O eternal and most gracious God, who having married man and woman together, and made them one flesh, wouldst have them also to become one soul, so as that they might maintain a...

My God, my God, what am I put to when I am put to consider and put off the root, the fuel, the occasion of my sickness? What Hippocrates, what Galen, could show me that in my bo...

Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them, and of their buttresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit...

It is the exaltation of misery to fall from a near hope of happiness. And in that vehement imprecation, the prophet expresses the highest of God's anger, _Give them, O Lord, wha...

But pass to our third part and last part: As this issue of death is _liberatio per mortem_, a deliverance by the death of another. _Sufferentiam Job audiisti, et vidisti finem D...