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 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