All in heaven are perfectly happy in the place assigned to them, is Piccardo's answer to Dante (_Paradiso_, iii. 70-88): 'So that our being thus, from threshold unto threshold throughout the realm, is a joy to all the realm, as to the King, who draweth our wills to what he willeth: and his will is our peace.'
ll. 23-4. The variants in these lines show that _1633_ has in this poem followed not _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ but _A18_, _N_, _TC_.
PAGE =25=. A VALEDICTION: OF MY NAME IN THE WINDOW.
I have adopted from the title of this poem in _D_, _H49_, _Lec_ the correct manner of entitling all these poems. In the printed editions the titles run straight on, _A Valediction of my name, in the window_. This has led in the case of the next of these poems, _A Valediction of the booke_, to the mistake expressed in the title of _1633_, _Valediction to his Booke_, and repeated by Grosart, that the latter was a dedication, 'formed the concluding poem of the missing edition of his poems.' This is a complete mistake. _Valediction_ is the general title of a poem bidding farewell. _Of the Booke_, _Of teares_, &c., indicate the particular themes. This is clearly brought out in _O'F_, where they are brought together and numbered. _Valediction 2. of Teares_, &c.
PAGE =26=, l. 28. _The Rafters of my body, bone._ Compare: 'First, _Ossa_, bones, We know in the naturall and ordinary acceptation, what they are; They are these Beames, and Timbers, and Rafters of these Tabernacles, these Temples of the Holy Ghost, these bodies of ours.' _Sermons_ 80. 51. 516.
PAGE =27=, ll. 31-2. _Till my returne, repaire And recompact my scattered body so._
This verse is rightly printed in the 1633 edition. In that of 1635 it went wrong; and the errors were transmitted through all the subsequent editions, and have been retained by Grosart and Chambers, but corrected in the Grolier Club edition. The full stop after 'so' was changed to a comma on the natural but mistaken assumption that 'so' pointed forward to the immediately following 'as'. In fact, 'so' refers _back_ to the preceding verse. Donne has described how from his anatomy or skeleton, i.e. his name scratched in the glass, the lady may repair and recompact his whole frame, and he opens the new verse by bidding her do so. Compare: 'In this chapter ... we have Job's Anatomy, Jobs Sceleton, the ruins to which he was reduced.... Job felt the hand of destruction upon him, and he felt the hand of preservation too; and it was all one hand: This is God's Method ... even God's demolitions are super-edifications, his Anatomies, his dissections are so many recompactings, so many resurrections; God winds us off the Skein, that he may weave us up into the whole peece, and he cuts us out of the whole peece into peeces, that he may make us up into a whole garment.' _Sermons_ 80. 43. 127-9. Again, 'It is a divorce and no super-induction, it is a separating, and no redintegration.' _Sermons_ 80. 55. 552. With the third line, 'As all the virtuous powers,' Donne begins a new comparison which is completed in the next stanza. Therefore the sixth stanza closes rightly in the 1633 text with a colon. The full stop of the later editions, which Chambers adopts, is obviously wrong. Grosart has a semicolon, but as he retains the comma at 'so' and puts a semicolon at the end of the previous stanza, the sense becomes very obscure.