Another spelling bee word new to me. Searching for it led me to a page about John Donne
and a number of unusual words he coined. I will put the paragraph with the interesting words
in red. Here's the word I started from:
longanimity
n.
LL longanimitas < L longus, LONG1 + animus, mind: see ANIMAL6 patient endurance of injuries; forbearance





XI. John Donne.

§ 13. Sermons.


But Donne’s fame as a prose writer rests not on these occasional and paradoxical pieces, but
on his sermons. His reputation as a preacher was, probably, wider than as a poet, and both
contributed to his most distinctive and generally admitted title to fame as the greatest wit of his
age, in the fullest sense of the word. Of the many sermons he preached, at Whitehall, at St.
Paul’s as prebend and as dean, at Linocln’s inn, at St. Dunstan’s church, at noblemen’s
houses, on embassies and other special occasions, some five were issued in his lifetime; and,
after his death, three large folios were published by his son containing eighty (1640), fifty
(1649) and twenty-five (1669) sermons respectively. Some are still in manuscript.
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In Donne’s sermons, all the qualities of his poems are present in a different medium; the swift
and subtle reasoning, the powerful yet often quaint imagery; the intense feeling; and, lastly, the
wonderful music of the style, which is inseparable from the music of the thought. The general
character of the sermon in the seventeenth century was such as to evoke all Donne’s strength,
and to intensify some of his weaknesses. The minute analysis of the text with a view to educing
from it what the preacher believed to be the doctrine it taught or the practical lessons it
inculcated, by legitimate inference, by far-fetched analogy, or by quaint metaphor, was a task
for which Donne’s intellect, imagination and wide range of multifarious learning were well
adapted. The fathers, the schoolmen and “our great protestant divines” (notably Calvin, to
whom, in subtlety of exposition, he reckons even Augustine second) are his guides in the
interpretation and application of his text; and, for purposes of illustration, his range is much
wider—classical poets, history sacred and secular, saints’ legendaries, popular Spanish
devotional writers, Jesuit controversialists and casuists, natural science, the discoveries of
voyagers and, of course, the whole range of Scripture, canonical and apocryphal. It is strange
to find, at times, a conceit or allusion which had done service in the love poems reappearing in
the texture of a pious and exalted meditation. In the sermons, as in the poems (where it has led
to occasional corruptions of the text), he uses words that, if not obsolete, were growing
rare—“bezar,” “defaulk,” “triacle,” “lation”—but, more often, he coins or adopts already
coined “inkhorn” terms—“omnisufficiency,” “nullifidians,” “longanimity,” “exinanition.”

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Breadth and unity of treatment in seventeenth century oratory are apt to be sacrificed to the
minute elaboration of each head, and their ingenious, rather than luminous and convincing,
interconnection. But Donne’s ingenuity is inexhaustible, and, through every subtlety and bizarre
interpretation, the hearer was (and, even to-day, the reader is) carried forward by the weight
and force of the preacher’s fervid reasoning. Much of the Scriptural exegesis is fanciful or out
of date. The controversial exposure of what were held to be Roman corruptions and separatist
heresies has an interest mainly for the historian. In Donne’s scholastic, ultra-logical treatment,
the rigid skeleton of seventeenth century theology is, at times, presented in all its sternness and
unattractiveness. From the extremest deductions, he is saved by the moderation which was the
key-note of his church, and by his own good sense and deep sympathy with human nature. But
Donne is most eloquent when, escaping from dogmatic minutiae and controversial “points,” he
appeals directly to the heart and conscience. A reader may care little for the details of
seventeenth century theology and yet enjoy without qualification Donne’s fervid and original
thinking, and the figurative richness and splendid harmonies of his prose in passages of
argument, of exhortation and of exalted meditation. It is Donne the poet who transcends every
disadvantage of theme and method, and an outworn fashion in wit and learning. There are
sentences in the sermons which, in beauty of imagery and cadence, are not surpassed by
anything he wrote in verse, or by any prose of the century from Hooker’s to Sir Thomas
Browne’s:
The soul that is accustomed to direct herself to God upon every occasion; that, as a flower at
sun-rising, conceives a sense of God in every beam of his, and spreads and dilates itself
towards him in a thankfulness in every small blessing that he sheds upon her; that soul that as a
flower at the sun’s declining contracts, and gathers in and shuts up herself, as though she had
received a blow, whensoever she hears her Saviour wounded by an oath, or blasphemy, or
execration; that soul who, whatsoever string be strucken in her, base or treble, her high or her
low estate, is ever tun’d towards God, that soul prays sometimes when it does not know that
it prays.

The passage on occasional mercies (LXXX. 2); the peroration of the sermon on “a better
resurrection” (LXXX. 22); the meditations on death, as the leveller of earthly distinctions, or the
portal to a better life; the description of the death “of rapture and ecstasy” (LXXX. 27) are
other passages which illustrate the unique quality, the weight, fervour and wealth, of Donne’s
eloquence