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 melancholic arts, and fit to converse with your most retired thoughts, which begin with a sigh, and proceed in deep consideration, and end in a holy resolution. It is necessary to present these 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.

*Holy Dying, ch. i.

+ Holy Dying.

† Dedication to 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. Those 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 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.†

-Like a common-weed,

The sea-swell took her hair.

KEATS.

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 phantastic 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 wis

IMMODERATE GRIEF.

SOLEMN and appointed mournings are good expressions of our dearness to the departed soul, and of his worth, and our value of

dom 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 gra-
cious 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,-

And hark! the nightingale begins its song,
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird!
A melancholy bird? Oh, idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.

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 naturai 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?

him; and it hath its praise in nature, and in manners, and public customs. Something is to be given to custom, something to fame, to nature, and to civilities, and to the honor of the deceased friends; for that man is esteemed to die miserable, for whom no

It certainly is true that this is no new song of the poets. Bacon (whether truly or not is the question) says-Knowledge mitigates the fear of death; for, if a man be deeply imbued with the contemplation of mortality and the corruptible nature of all things, he will easily concur with Epictetus, who went forth one day, and saw a woman weeping for her pitcher of earth that was broken; and went forth the next day, and saw a woman weeping for her son that was dead; and therefore said, "Heri vidi fragilem frangi; hodie vidi mortalem mori." And therefore Virgil did excellently and profoundly couple the knowledge of causes and the conquest of all fears as concomi

tant:

Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum

Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari !

If any of my readers is desirous to discover the portion of truth and of error which these opinions of poets and philosophers contain, it is necessary to proceed with caution, and separately to examine the different causes which compose the painful associations with which death is accompanied : consisting, as it does, of a complication of terrors, aiding each other, and becoming formidable by their united operation, let him read Tucker's valuable Essay on Death, in vol. vii. of his admirable work on the Light of Nature; and let him remember that Lord Bacon, in his Doctrine of all the Motions in Nature, says, "The political motion is that by which the parts of a body are restrained from their own immediate appetites or tendencies, to unite in such a state as may preserve the existence of the whole body. Thus the spirit, which exists in all living bodies, keeps all the parts in due subjection; when it escapes, the body decomposes, or the similar parts unite—as metals rust, fluids turn sour: and in animals, when the spirit which held the parts together escapes, all things are dissolved and return to their own natures or principles: the oily parts to themselves, the aqueous to themselves, &c., upon which necessarily ensues that confusion of parts, observable in putrefaction." So true it is, that in nature all is beauty! that notwithstanding our partial views, and distressing associations, the forms of death, misshapen as we suppose them, are but the tendencies to union in similar natures.

In this spirit was the inscription written which is now on the monument of Lord Bacon. He died in the year 1626; and, according to his wish, is buried in the same grave with his mother. Near to him lies his faithful secretary; and although only a few letters of his name, scarcely legible,

friend or relative sheds a tear, or pays a solemn sigh. Some showers sprinkled upon my grave would do well and comely.

But that which is to be faulted in this particular is, when the grief is immoderate and unreasonable: and Paula Romana deserved to have felt the weight of St. Hierom's severe reproof, when at the death of every of her children she almost wept herself into her grave.*

And it hath been observed, that those greater and stormy passions do so spend the whole stock of grief, that they presently admit a comfort and contrary affection; while a sorrow that is even and temperate goes on to its period with expectation and the

can now be traced, he will ever be remembered for his affectionate attachment to his master and friend. Upon the monument which he raised to Lord Bacon, who appears, sitting in deep but tranquil thought, he has inscribed this epitaph :

FRANCISCUS BACON BARO DE VERULAM S: ALBANI VICmes
SEU NOTORIBUS TITULIS

SCIENTIARUM LUMEN, FACUNDIÆ LEX

SIC SEDEBAT:

QUI POSTQUAM OMNIA NATURALIS SAPIENTIÆ

ET CIVILIS ARCANA EVOLVISSET

NATURÆ DECRETUM EXPLEVIT

COMPOSITA SOLVANTUR.

Is not decomposition, in the sight of omniscience, as beautiful as union? * Ought we in our grief for the loss of each other, to murmur at the order of nature, at the dispensations of Providence, or ought we to remember that

They are not lost

Who leave their parents for the calm of heaven.

I know well

That they who love their friends most tenderly
Still bear their loss the best. There is in love
A consecrated power, that seems to wake
Only at the touch of death from its repose,
In the profoundest depths of thinking souls,
Superior to the outward signs of grief,

Sighing or tears,-when these have past away,
It rises calm and beautiful, like the moon,
Saddening the solemn night, yet with that sadness
Mingling the breath of undisturbed peace.

CITY OF THE PLAGUE.