Digital Donne: the Online Variorum
The 1654 Prose Letters Letter 10, cont. (p.25) |
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manent: in writing this Sermon which your Ladiship was pleased to hear before, I confesse I satisfie an ambition of mine own, but it is the ambition of obeying your commandment, not onely an ambition of leaving my name in the memory, or in the Cabinet: and yet, since I am going out of the Kingdom, and perchance out of the world, (when God shall have given my soul a place in heaven) it shall the lesse di- minish your Ladiship, if my poor name be found about you. I know what dead car- kasses things written are, in respect of things spoken. But in things of this kinde, that soul that inanimates them, receives debts from them: The Spirit of God that di- ctates them in the speaker or writer, and is present in his tongue or hand, meets him- self again (as we meet our selves in a glass) in the eies and hearts of the hearers and readers: and that Spirit, which is ever the same to an equall devotion, makes a wri- ting and a speaking equall means to edifi- cation. In one circumstance, my preaching [CW: and] |
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