usually regards himself as a mouthpiece rather than a man giving expression to himself.  In the circumstances what surprises us is that the Sermons reveal, not so little, but so much of Donne.  Indeed, they make us feel far more intimate with Donne than do his private letters, many of which are little more than exercises in composition.  As a preacher, no less than as a poet, 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 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: