She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat, like patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief.

Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But either it was different in blood;
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it;
Making it momentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied[102] night,
That, in a spleen,[103] unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, Behold!
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

[Footnote 98: Small sword.]
[Footnote 99: Burdens.]
[Footnote 100: Cloud.]
[Footnote 101: Encompassed.]
[Footnote 102: Black.]
[Footnote 103: Caprice, whim.]

FRANCIS BACON.

OF DEATH.

[From the Essays.]

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural
fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other. Certainly,
the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another
world, is holy and religious; but the fear of it, as a tribute due unto
nature, is weak. Yet in religious meditations there is sometimes mixture
of vanity and of superstition. You shall read in some of the friars'
books of mortification, that a man should think with himself what the
pain is, if he have but his finger's end pressed or tortured; and
thereby imagine what the pains of death are, when the whole body is
corrupted and dissolved; when many times death passeth with less pain
than the torture of a limb; for the most vital parts are not the
quickest of sense. And by him that spake only as a philosopher and
natural man, it was well said, _Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors
ipsa._[104] Groans and convulsions, and a discolored face, and friends
weeping, and blacks and obsequies, and the like, show death terrible. It
is worthy the observing, that there is no passion in the mind of man so
weak but it mates and masters the fear of death, and therefore death is
no such terrible enemy, when a man hath so many attendants about him
that can win the combat of him. Revenge triumphs over death; love
slights it; honor aspireth to it; grief flieth to it; fear
preoccupateth[105] it. It is as natural to die as to