floating fragment of unfamiliar vegetation, which
met those early navigators, there was a certain fantastic experiment,
in which, as was alleged, Paracelsus had been lucky. For Browne and
others it became the crucial type of the kind of agency in nature
which, as they conceived, it was the proper function of science to
reveal in larger operation. "The subject of my last letter," says Dr.
Henry Power, then a student, writing to Browne in 1648, the last year
of Charles the First, "being so high and noble a piece of chemistry,
invites me once more to request an experimental eviction of it from
yourself; and I hope you will not chide my importunity in this
petition, or be angry at my so frequent knockings at your door to
obtain a grant of so great and admirable a [152] mystery." What the
enthusiastic young student expected from Browne, so high and noble a
piece of chemistry, was the "re-individualling of an incinerated
plant"--a violet, turning to freshness, and smelling sweet again, out
of its ashes, under some genially fitted conditions of the chemic art.

Palingenesis, resurrection, effected by orderly prescription--the
"re-individualling" of an "incinerated organism"--is a subject which
affords us a natural transition to the little book of the Hydriotaphia,
or Treatise of Urn-Burial--about fifty or sixty pages--which, together
with a very singular letter not printed till after Browne's death, is
perhaps, after all, the best justification of Browne's literary
reputation, as it were his own curiously figured urn, and
treasure-place of immortal memory.

In its first presentation to the public this letter was connected with
Browne's Christian Morals; but its proper and sympathetic collocation
would be rather with the Urn-Burial, of which it is a kind of prelude,
or strikes the keynote. He is writing in a very complex situation--to
a friend, upon occasion of the death of a common friend. The deceased
apparently had been little known to Browne himself till his recent
visits, while the intimate friend to whom he is writing had been absent
at the time; and the leading motive of Browne's letter is the deep
impression he has received during those visits, of a sort of [153]
physical beauty in the coming of death, with which he still surprises
and moves his reader. There had been, in this case, a tardiness and
reluctancy in the circumstances of dissolution, which had permitted
him, in the character of a physician, as it wer