suggest that strong and weighty, yet gentle and beautiful style which was his habit: 'Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.' 'Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl-chain of all virtues." 'Anger is one of the sinews of the soul: he that wants it hath a maimed mind." 'Tombs are the clothes of the dead. A grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered.' They that marry ancient people, merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves in hope that one will come and cut the halter.' 'Heat gotten by degrees, with motion and exercise, is more natural, and stays longer by one, than what is gotten all at once by coming to the fire. Goods acquired by industry prove commonly more lasting than lands by descent.' 'It is dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the pit of hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with the devil's rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword; and from making of sport, they come to doing of mischief.' 'Generally, nature hangs out a sign of simplicity in the face of a fool, and there is enough in his countenance for a hue and cry to take him on suspicion; or else it is stamped in the figure of his body; their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room for wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room.' While the clash of arms is drawing men of letters from contemplation into the war of pens, Sir Thomas Browne, a physician and an idealist, is plunging into the abysses of meditative reverie. Unlike most of his profession, his delight is in the preternatural and visionary; he penetrates the internal structure of things, sees in the universe more than a dry catalogue, divines in every fact a mysterious soul, looks as from an eminence beyond visible phenomena, trembling with a kind of veneration before the dim vistas of the unknown, stirred to an eloquent sadness by the decay of nature and the dust of forgotten tombs, moved with an eloquent pity for the plumed and disorderly procession swallowed up in the fatal, all-devouring pit: 'Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle must conclude and shut up all. There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things. Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us now we may be buried in our survivors. Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks... Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana; he is almost lost that built it: time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse; confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equal durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamemnon. Who knows whether the best of men be known; or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembered in the known account of time. Without the favour of the everlasting register, the first man had been as unknown as the last, and Methuselah's long life had been his only chronicle. Oblivion is not to be hired: the greatest part must be content to be as though they had not been; to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man. Twentyseven names make up the first story before the Flood; and the recorded names ever since contain not one living century. The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox? . Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which, notwithstanding, is no unhappy stupidity. . . . The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams. . Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omitting ceremonies of bravery in the infancy of his nature.'1 Those whose minds are intent, constantly or mainly, on mere pleasure and gain, on the petty interests of appetite, will here find little to their satisfaction. But the meditations that lead us into the inner chambers of life and death are, if we be rightly attuned, more precious than the positive facts that put money into a man's pocket or actual knowledge into his head. We are more than sentiment — we are rational, we are ethical. The scale of our affinities is indicated by the intellect which seeks to transcend the finite in space and time and truth, by the conscience which owns the infinite in duty and stays itself on the infinite in love. A noble melancholy is the source of every generous passion and of every philosophical discovery." Whatever depth there may be in our tenderness, whatever reverence in our voice, flows into us from the two eternities. Another who rises above the din of strife into the region of spiritualities, is Jeremy Taylor,' an Anglican and a Royalist, upright, zealous, tolerant, a sensitive and creative genius, less profound than Browne, but as opulent in resources, warmer, richer, more gorgeous in style. His soul was made for the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque. Never was such wealth and sweetness of imagery, or readier perception of analogies in things familiar and fair. He sees the skylark build her nest on Norfolk.' Hydriotaphia, or Urn Buria!; a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns lately found in 2 Melancholy is the genuine inspiration of true genius: whoever is not conscious of this affection of the mind must not aspire to any great celebrity as an author. Madam de Staël. Happy is the country where the authors are melancholy, the merchants satisfied, the rich gloomy. Ibid. 3 Son of a poor surgeon-barber, entered college at fourteen as a sizar, won his way, married a natural daughter of Charles I, was wrecked in the storm of the Civil War, twice imprisoned, and after the Restoration loaded with honors. the ground, sees her rise amid the early perfumes of the fields, soaring highest of all the feathered tribe, or breasting the tempest in her upward flight, and compelled to return panting; then he thinks of the good man's spirit, struggling to ascend towards the throne of mercy: For so I have seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an castern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries here below. So is the prayer of a good man.' Or his full imagination traces in sensible colors the progress of sin: I have seen the little purls of a stream sweat through the bottom of a bank, and intenerate the stubborn pavement, till it hath made it fit for the impression of a child's foot; and it was despised, like the descending pearls of a misty morning, till it had opened its way and made a stream large enough to carry away the ruins of the undermined strand, and to invade the neighboring gardens: but then the despised drops were grown into an artificial river, and an intolerable mischief. So are the first entrances of sin stopped with the antidotes of a hearty prayer, and checked into sobriety by the eye of a reverend man, or the counsels of a single sermon: but when such beginnings are neglected, and our religion hath not in it so much philosophy as to think anything evil as long as we can endure it, they grow up to ulcers and pestilential evils; they destroy the soul by their abode, who at their first entry might have been killed with the pressure of a little finger.' With like fertility and continuity, he describes the growth of reason: 'We must not think that the life of a man begins when he can feed himself or walk alone, when he can fight or beget his like, for so he is contemporary with a camel or a cow; but he is first a man when he comes to a certain steady use of reason, according to his proportion: and when that is, all the world of men cannot tell precisely. Some are called at age at fourteen, some at one and twenty, some never; but all men late enough; for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But, as when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the brow of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shews a fair face and full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly; so is a man's reason and his life.' We e see that he is a philanthropist, who is not content to have religion a ritual or a dream; with whom the business of life is not to gather gold or get station, but to be a man; not to pass an ephemeral being in a whirl of fashion, but to be a woman; a godly man, who does not spoil the poetic depth of holiness by reducing its speech to a technical use; a counsellor, who does his work only with thought that it be good, whose marriage-let us hope was the noble poem, the interior relation, the rudimentary heaven, which he would have it be: 'They that enter into the state of marriage cast a die of the greatest contingency, and yet of the greatest interest in the world, next to the last throw for eternity. Life or death, felicity or a lasting sorrow, are in the power of marriage. A woman, indeed, ventures most, for she hath no sanctuary to retire to from an evil husband; she must dwell upon her sorrow, and hatch the eggs which her own folly or infelicity hath produced; and she is more under it, because her tormentor hath a warrant of prerogative, and the woman may complain to God, as subjects do of tyrant princes; but otherwise she hath no appeal in the causes of unkindness. And though the man can run from many hours of his sadness, yet he must return to it again; and when he sits among his neighbors, he remembers the objection that lies in his bosom, and he sighs deeply. The boys and the pedlers, and the fruiterers, shall tell of this man when he is carried to his grave, that he lived and died a poor wretched person. The stags in the Greek epigram, whose knees were clogged with frozen snow upon the mountains, came down to the brooks of the valleys, hoping to thaw their joints with the waters of the stream; but there the frost overtook them, and bound them fast in ice, till the young herdsmen took them in their stronger snare. It is the unhappy chance of many men, finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles; and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the chords of a man's or woman's peevishness. . . . Man and wife are equally concerned to avoid all offences of each other in the beginning of their conversation; every little thing can blast an infant blossom; and the breath of the south can shake the little rings of the vine, when first they begin to curl like the the locks of a new weaned boy: but when by age and consolidation they stiffen into the hardness of a stem, and have by the warm embraces of the sun and the kisses of heaven, brought forth their clusters, they can endure the storms of the north, and the loud noises of a tempest, and yet never be broken: so are the early unions of an unfixed marriage.' It is not a cold rigorist who speaks, but a saviour, who feels the sore travail of the world, and esteems nothing greater than by word or deed to minister comfort to a weary or troubled soul: 'This is glory to thy voice, and employment fit for the brightest angel. But so have I seen the sun kiss the frozen earth, which was bound up with the images of death, and the colder breath of the north; and then the waters break from their inclosures, and melt with joy, and run in useful channels; and the flies do rise again from their little graves in walls, and dance awhile in the air, to tell that there is joy within, and that the great mother of creatures will open the stock of her new refreshment, become useful to mankind, and sing praises to her Redeemer. So is the heart of a sorrowful man under the discourses of a wise comforter.' He has, like Browne, the stamp of the national spirit, the Northern gloom which, in the days of the Edda, was soothed by the roaring of the sea and the hollow blast of the barren heath. For what is the end and sum of mortal designs? A dark night and an ill guide, 'a boisterous sea and a broken cable,'- a rock and a wreck, while they who weep loudest have yet to enter into the storm. All, fair as the morning, brave as the noon, are the heri tage of worms. a dead man. Go where you may, you tread upon the bones of 'Where is the dust that has not been alive?" Nature calls us to meditate of death, by those things which are the instruments of acting it; and God by all the variety of His providence, makes us see death everywhere in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person. Nature has given us one harvest every year, but death hath two; and the spring and the autumn send throngs of men and women to charnel-houses: and all the summer long, men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the Sirian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of the autumn are laid up for all the year's provision, and the man that gathers them eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. 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.' The style of all these writers, by its copiousness and pomp, by its redundancies and irregularities, links them to the age of Elizabeth. It has the Elizabethan ardor and the Elizabethan faults. If now we turn to Cowley, we shall see, in startling contrast, the powerful and erratic breeze slacken to a smooth and placid equability: The first minister of state has not so much business in public as a wise man has in private: if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company: the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and Nature under his consideration. There is no saying shocks me so much as that which I hear very often, that a man does not know how to pass his time.' Of Oliver Cromwell: 'What can be more extraordinary than that a person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to succeed in, so improbable a design as the destruction of one of the most ancient and most solidly founded monarchies upon the earth? that he should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly allied family: to do all this under the name and wages of a parliament; to trample upon them, too, as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he grew weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard of monster out of their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes, and adopted a brother to the gods of the earth; to call together parliaments with a word of his pen, and scatter them again with the breath of his mouth; to be humbly and daily petitioned, that he would please to be hired, at the rate of two millions a year, to be the master of those who had hired him before to be their servant; to have the estates and lives of three kingdoms as much at his disposal as was the little inheritance of his father, and to be as noble and liberal in the spending of them; and lastly - for there is no end of all the particulars of his glory to bequeath all this with one word to 1 Young's Night Thoughts. |