Digital Donne: the Online Variorum
The 1654 Prose Letters Letter 27, cont. (p.79) |
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and time gives, Reason and discretion, and so am as empty and light as Vanity can make me; but I have over fraught my self with Vice, and so am riddingly subject to two contrary wrackes, Sinking and Over- setting, and under the iniquity of such a disease as inforces the patient when he is al- most starved, not only to fast, but to purge. For I have much to take in, and much to cast out; sometimes I thinke it easier to dis- charge my self of vice then of vanity, as one may sooner carry the fire out of a room then the smoake: and then I see it was a new vanity to think so. And when I think sometimes that vanity, because it is thinne and airie, may be expelled with vertue or businesse, or substantiall vice; I finde that I give entrance thereby to new vices. Cer- tainly as the earth and water, one fad, the other fluid, make but one bodie: so to aire and Vanity, there is but one Centrum morbia. And that which later Physicians say of our bodies, is fitter for our mindes: for that which they call Destruction, which is a cor- [CW: ruption] |
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