"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,"
"I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the God of Love was born,"
"I wonder by my troth what thou and I Did till we loved?"
"Bracelet of bright hair about the bone,"
that attracts the ordinary man and woman of to-day.
In spite of repeated incentives to listen, we turn deaf ears to sermons: towards poetry we are inclined to be perhaps too kind.