"For those who have experienced, or who at least understand, the ups-and-downs, the ins-and-outs of human temperament, the alternations not merely of passion and satiety, but of passion and laughter, of passion and melancholy reflection, of passion earthly enough and spiritual rapture almost heavenly, there is no poet and hardly any writer like Donne."
Our appetite for Donne was probably first whetted by Izaak Walton, who wrote so admirable a biography of him. His personality intrigues us from the start, his Marlowesque thirst for experience, experience of the intellect and experience of sensation, finds a sympathetic echo to-day in the minds of most of us. He knew a good deal about medicine, law, astronomy and physiology, as well as theology: he joined the expedition of Essex to Cadiz in 1596: he was ever adventuring in science, in love and in travel. At the age of forty-two, poverty-stricken and a failure, he took Orders and became one of the greatest preachers we have ever had. He poured his whole soul into his sermons, and held his congregations spellbound with his gorgeous prose, "perhaps never equalled for the beauty of its rhythm and the Shakespearean magnificence of its diction": he dwelt mainly on the subject of Sin (about which he knew a good deal from experience), Death, God, Heaven and Infinity. Listen to this on Eternity: "And all the powerfull Kings, and all the beautifull Queenes of this world, were but as a bed of flowers, some gathered at six, some at seven, some at eight, All in one Morning, in respect of this Day. In all the two thousand yeares of Nature, before the Law given by Moses, and the two thousand yeares of Law.... In all this six thousand, and in all those, which God may be pleased to adde, ... in this House of his Fathers, there was never heard quarter clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to turne." Or this personal confession (rarest of delights in sermons): "I throw my selfe downe 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 Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell; Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer. So certainely is there nothing, nothing in spirituall things, perfect in this world."
"If Donne," says Robert Lynd, "had written much prose in this kind, his Sermons would be as famous as the writings of any of the saints since the days of the Apostles."
If only more sermons contained such human touches as the following, the modern church-goers would be more plentiful:—
"I am not all here, I am here now preaching upon this text, and I am at home in my Library considering whether S. Gregory, or S. Hierome, have said best of this text, before. I am here speaking to you, and yet I consider by the way, in the same instant, what it is likely you will say to one another, when I have done, you are not all here neither; you are here now, hearing me, and yet you are thinking that you have heard a better sermon somewhere else, of this text before."
But as an example of his highest power of eloquence and impassioned imagination I will quote a passage that can challenge any passage in the whole range of English prose:
"The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney, are no Epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; It tels me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons graves is speechlesse too, it sayes nothing, it distinguishes nothing: As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a Prince whom thou couldest not look upon, will trouble thine eyes, if the winde blow it thither; and when a whirle-winde hath blowne the dust of the Church-yard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Church-yard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again, and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre, and this the Yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran...."
But it is Donne the poet, the Donne who wrote
"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought,"