with
a sight weak and delicate and softened with the long and happy health and
quiet that God has been pleased to give me the greatest part of my time,
I had in my imagination fancied them so insupportable, that, in truth, I
was more afraid than I have since found I had cause: by which I am still
more fortified in this belief, that most of the faculties of the soul, as
we employ them, more trouble the repose of life than they are any way
useful to it.

I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the
most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases; I have already
had the trial of five or six very long and very painful fits; and yet I
either flatter myself, or there is even in this state what is very well
to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and
of the menaces, conclusions, and consequences which physic is ever
thundering in our ears; but the effect even of pain itself is not so
sharp and intolerable as to put a man of understanding into rage and
despair. I have at least this advantage by my stone, that what I could
not hitherto prevail upon myself to resolve upon, as to reconciling and
acquainting myself with death, it will perfect; for the more it presses
upon and importunes me, I shall be so much the less afraid to die. I had
already gone so far as only to love life for life's sake, but my pain
will dissolve this intelligence; and God grant that in the end, should
the sharpness of it be once greater than I shall be able to bear, it does
not throw me into the other no less vicious extreme to desire and wish to
die!

"Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes:"

["Neither to wish, nor fear to die." (Or:)
"Thou shouldest neither fear nor desire the last day."
--Martial, x. 7.]

they are two passions to be feared; but the one has its remedy much
nearer at hand than the other.

As to the rest, I have always found the precept that so rigorously
enjoins a resolute countenance and disdainful and indifferent comportment
in the toleration of infirmities to be ceremonial. Why should
philosophy, which only has respect to life and effects, trouble itself
about these external appearances? Let us leave that care to actors and
masters of rhetoric, who set so great a value upon our gestures. Let her
allow this vocal frailty to disease, if it be neither cordial nor
stomachic, and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by