acre of my corn: the body of all, the
substance of all is safe, so long as the soul is safe.

The self-contempt with which his imagination loved to intoxicate itself
finds more lavish expression in a passage in a sermon delivered on Easter
Sunday two years later:

When I consider what I was in my parents' loins (a substance
unworthy of a word, unworthy of a thought), when I consider what I
am now (a volume of diseases bound up together; a dry cinder, if I
look for natural, for radical moisture; and yet a sponge, a bottle
of overflowing Rheums, if I consider accidental; an aged child, a
grey-headed infant, and but the ghost of mine own youth), when I
consider what I shall be at last, by the hand of death, in my grave
(first, but putrefaction, and, not so much as putrefaction; I shall
not be able to send forth so much as ill air, not any air at all,
but shall be all insipid, tasteless, savourless, dust; for a while,
all worms, and after a while, not so much as worms, sordid,
senseless, nameless dust), when I consider the past, and present,
and future state of this body, in this world, I am able to
conceive, able to express the worst that can befall it in nature,
and the worst that can be inflicted on it by man, or fortune. But
the least degree of glory that God hath prepared for that body in
heaven, I am not able to express, not able to conceive.

Excerpts of great prose seldom give us that rounded and final beauty which
we expect in a work of art; and the reader of Donne's _Sermons_ in their
latest form will be wise if he comes to them expecting to find beauty
piecemeal and tarnished though in profusion. He will be wise, too, not to
expect too many passages of the same intimate kind as that famous
confession in regard to prayer which Mr. Pearsall Smith quotes, and which
no writer on Donne can afford not to quote:

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God,
and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and
his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach,
for the whining of a door. I talk on, in the same posture of
praying; eyes lifted up; knees bowed down; as though I prayed to
God; and, if God, or his Angels should ask me, when I thought last
of God in that prayer, I cannot tell. Sometimes I find that
I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget i