tolerance. "You know," he once wrote to a friend, "I have never imprisoned the word religion.... They" (the churches) "are all virtual beams of one sun." Few converts in those days of the wars of religion wrote with such wise reason of the creeds as did Donne in the lines: To adore or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must and about must go; And what the hill's suddenness resists win so. This surely was the heresy of an inquisitive mind, not the mood of a theologian. It betrays a tolerance springing from ardent doubt, not from ardent faith. It is all in keeping with one's impression of the young Donne as a man setting out bravely in his cockle-shell on the oceans of knowledge and experience. He travels, though he knows not why he travels. He loves, though he knows not why he loves. He must escape from that "hydroptic, immoderate" thirst of experience by yielding to it. One fancies that it was in this spirit that he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596 and afterwards sailed to the Azores. Or partly in this spirit, for he himself leads one to think that his love-affairs may have had something to do with it. In the second of those prematurely realistic descriptions of storm and calm relating to the Azores voyage, he writes: Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain, Or to disuse me from the queasy pain Of being belov'd, and loving, or the thirst Of honour, or fair death, out pusht me first.