Slow, slow, fresh Fount, keep time with my salt Tears.
l. 17. I have ventured to adopt 'groane' for 'grow' ('grone' and 'growe' are almost indistinguishable) from _A18_, _N_, _TC_; _D_, _H49_, _Lec_; and _H40_. It is surely much more in Donne's style than the colourless and pointless 'growe'. It is, too, in closer touch with the next line. If 'growing' is all we are to have predicated of the mandrake, then it should be sufficient for the fountain to 'stand', or 'flow'. The chief difficulty in accepting the MS. reading is that the mandrake is most often said to shriek, sometimes to howl, not to groan:
I prethee yet remember Millions are now in graves, which at last day Like mandrakes shall rise shreeking. Webster, _The White Devil_, V. vi. 64.
On the other hand the lover most often groans:
Thy face hath not the power to make love grone. Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 131. 6.
Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groane. Shakespeare, _Sonnets_, 133. 1.
_Ros._ I would be glad to see it. (_i.e._ _his heart_)
_Bir._ I would you heard it groan. _Love's Labour's Lost._
In a metaphor where two objects are identified such a transference of attributes is quite permissible. Moreover, although 'shriek' is the more common word, 'groan' is used of the mandrake:
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan, I would invent as bitter searching terms, &c. _2 Hen. VI_, III. ii. 310.
In the _Elegie upon ... Prince Henry_ (p. 269, ll. 53-4) Donne writes:
though such a life wee have As but so many mandrakes on his grave.
l. 3. _Esloygne._ Chambers alters to 'eloign', but Donne's is a good English form.
From worldly care himself he did esloyne. Spenser, _F. Q._ I. iv. 20.
The two forms seem to have run parallel from the outset, but that with 's' disappears after the seventeenth century.
PAGE =30=, l. 7. _Her who from Pindar could allure._ Corinna, who five times defeated Pindar at Thebes. Aelian, _Var. Hist._ xiii. 25, referred to by Professor Norton. He quotes also from Pausanias, ix. 22.
l. 8. _And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame._ His wife, Polla Argentaria, who 'assisted her husband in correcting the three first books of his _Pharsalia_'. Lemprière. The source of this tradition I cannot discover. The only reference indicated by Schanz is to Apollinaris Sidonius (Epist. 2, 10, 6, p. 46), who includes her among a list of women who aided and inspired their husbands: 'saepe versum ... complevit ... Argentaria cum Lucano.'