By fascinating contrast, Donne was frequently underemployed, and perhaps a bit desperate just a decade and change prior and had applied for a job in Virginia

The years between 1607 and 1610 are biographically murky. The letters are hard to date and hard to decipher, and the best historical records we have are of jobs that didn’t happen. He failed to get a position in the Queen’s household in 1607, and there are references in the letters to his application to jobs in Ireland or, even more remotely, Virginia, but neither came to anything, if they were ever serious prospects to begin with. It’s equally likely that they were an attempt on his part to look industrious, both to his friends and to himself; neither Ireland nor Virginia were at all desirable places at the time.

quote via: Rundell, Katherine. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. with excerpt linked at https://hypothes.is/a/M3Ma0PXdEe6Lk-doNS30CQ

Rundell, Katherine. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022.

Donne, John. A Sermon Vpon the Eighth Verse of the First Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles: Preached to the Honourable Company of the Virginian Plantation, 13. Nouemb. 1622. By Iohn Donne Deane of Saint Pauls, London. 1622. Reprint, London: printed [by Bernard Alsop] for Thomas Iones, 1624. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo2/A73849.0001.001?view=toc.

The cadence here reminds me of Donne's "XIV. MEDITATION":

If we consider Eternity, into that, Tyme never entred; Eternity is not an everlasting flux of Tyme; but Tyme is a short parenthesis in a longe period; and Eternity had been the same, as it is, though time had never beene.

Superficies

Definition