soul, a soul at least furnished with what is necessary towards his well-being. And now let us consider what that thing is which we call years of discretion. The young man is passed his tutors, and arrived at the bondage of a caitiff spirit; he is run from discipline, and is let loose to passion. The man by this time hath wit enough to choose his vice, to act his lust, to court his mistress, to talk confidently, and ignorantly, and perpetually to despise his betters, to deny nothing to his appetite, to do things that when he is indeed a man he must for ever be ashamed of: for this is all the discretion that most men show in the first stage of their manhood. They can discern good from evil; and they prove their skill by leaving all that is good, and wallowing in the evils of folly and an unbridled appetite. And by this time the young man hath contracted vicious habits, and is a beast in manners, and therefore it will not be fitting to reckon the beginning of his life: he is a fool in his understanding, and that is a sad death, &c.† ON DEATH. I SHALL entertain you in a charnel-house, and carry your meditation awhile into the chambers of death, where you shall find the rooms dressed up with melancholick arts, and fit to converse with your most retired thoughts, which begin with a sigh, + Holy Dying, ch. i. and proceed in deep consideration, and end in a It is necessary to present these holy resolution. bundles of cypress.‡ The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves.† It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the spritefulness of youth and the fair cheeks and the full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so I have seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as a lamb's fleece: but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell, &c. Dedication to Holy Dying. + Holy Dying. The wild fellow in Petronius that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy the sea towards the shore to find a grave: and it cast him into some sad thoughts: that peradventure this man's wife in some part of the continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's return; or it may be his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old man's cheek ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this the end and sum of all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family, and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. Then looking upon the carcass, he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who the day before cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he thought to be at home. See how the man swims who was so angry two t -Like a common-weed, KEATS, days since; his passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death. Of all the evils of the world which are reproached with an evil character, death is the most innocent of its accusation.+ To the same effect Bishop Taylor says, in another part of his Holy Dying,-'Take away but the pomps of death, the disguises, and solemn bug-bears, and the actings by candlelight, and proper and phantastick ceremonies, the minstrels and the noise-makers, the women and the weepers, the swoonings and the shriekings, the nurses and the physicians, the dark room and the ministers, the kindred and the watches, and then to die is easy, ready, and quitted from its troublesome circumstances. It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday, or a maid-servant to-day; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men and many fools; and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die.' And in an essay ascribed (erroneously,) I think, to Lord Bacon, he says, 'I have often thought of death, and I find it the least of all evils.' But in the same essay the author says, 'Death arrives gracious only to such as sit in darkness, or lie heavy burthened with grief and irons; to the poor Christian that sits bound in the galley; to despairful widows, pensive prisoners, and deposed kings: to them whose fortune runs back, and whose spirits mutiny; unto such death is a redeemer, and the grave a place for retiredness and rest. These wait upon the shore of death, and waft unto him to draw near, wishing above all others to see his star, that they might be led to his place, wooing the remorseless sisters to wind down the watch of their life, and to break them off before the hour.' One of the sweetest of our modern poets says, IMMODERATE GRIEF. SOLEMN and appointed mournings are good expressions of our dearness to the departed soul, and of his worth, and our value of him; and it hath its praise in nature, and in manners, and And hark! the nightingale begins its song, So sings the sweet poet. Are these the mere fancies of the brain, illusions of the imagination, or does philosophy echo what the poet sings? Let us try this by seeing whether in death, which is as natural as life, there is not something melancholy? Is there nothing melancholy in a death-bed ; in the agony and last contentions of the soul; the reluctancies and unwillingnesses of the body; the forehead washed with a new baptism, besmeared with a cold sweat, tenacious and clammy, apt to make it cleave to the roof of the coffin; the nose cold and undiscerning; the eyes dim as a sullied mirror; the feet cold; the hands stiff? How many of us have contemplated with admiration the graceful motion of the female form; the eye sparkling with intelligence; the countenance enlivened by wit, or animated or soothed by feeling? Is there nothing sad in the consciousness that in a few short years, perhaps in the next moment, sensation and motion will cease; the body lose its warmth, the eyes their lustre, and the lips and cheeks become livid? Is there nothing melancholy in the consciousness that these are but preludes to other changes? Will the poet still say, Oh, idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy? And will philosophy echo what the poet sings? |