t, he is inflamed by the creative heat. He
shows the same vehemence of fancy in the presence of the divine and
infernal universe--a vehemence that prevents even his most far-sought
extravagances from disgusting us as do the lukewarm follies of the
Euphuists. Undoubtedly the modern reader smiles when Donne, explaining
that man can be an enemy of God as the mouse can be an enemy to the
elephant, goes on to speak of "God who is not only a multiplied elephant,
millions of elephants multiplied into one, but a multiplied world, a
multiplied all, all that can be conceived by us, infinite many times over;
nay (if we may dare to say so) a multiplied God, a God that hath the
millions of the heathens' gods in Himself alone." But at the same time one
finds oneself taking a serious pleasure in the huge sorites of quips and
fancies in which he loves to present the divine argument. Nine out of ten
readers of the _Sermons_, I imagine, will be first attracted to them
through love of the poems. They need not be surprised if they do not
immediately enjoy them. The dust of the pulpit lies on them thickly
enough. As one goes on reading them, however, one becomes suddenly aware
of their florid and exiled beauty. One sees beyond their local theology to
the passion of a great suffering artist. Here are sentences that express
the Paradise, the Purgatory, and the Hell of John Donne's soul. A noble
imagination is at work--a grave-digging imagination, but also an
imagination that is at home among the stars. One can open Mr. Pearsall
Smith's anthology almost at random and be sure of lighting on a passage
which gives us a characteristic movement in the symphony of horror and
hope that was Donne's contribution to the art of prose. Listen to this,
for example, from a sermon preached in St. Paul's in January, 1626:

Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an
unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my
bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth with the beggary
of mine age; let me wither in a spittle under sharp, and foul, and
infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth
with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his
spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my
suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is
temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden,
but a mildew fallen upon one