--It is better to meet danger than to wait for it. He that is on
a lee shore, and foresees a hurricane, stands out to sea, and encounters
a storm to avoid a shipwreck.--_Colton._

~Death.~--It is not death, it is dying, that alarms me.--_Montaigne._

What is death? To go out like a light, and in a sweet trance to forget
ourselves and all the passing phenomena of the day, as we forget the
phantoms of a fleeting dream; to form, as in a dream, new connections
with God's world; to enter into a more exalted sphere, and to make a new
step up man's graduated ascent of creation.--_Zschokke._

Heaven gives its favorites early death.--_Byron._

Our respect for the dead, when they are _just_ dead, is something
wonderful, and the way we show it more wonderful still. We show it with
black feathers and black horses; we show it with black dresses and black
heraldries; we show it with costly obelisks and sculptures of sorrow,
which spoil half of our beautiful cathedrals. We show it with frightful
gratings and vaults, and lids of dismal stone, in the midst of the quiet
grass; and last, and not least, we show it by permitting ourselves to
tell any number of falsehoods we think amiable or credible in the
epitaph.--_Ruskin._

There are remedies for all things but death.--_Carlyle._

We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one
whom we love.--_Mme. de Stael._

Too early fitted for a better state.--_Dryden._

Death, the dry pedant, spares neither the rose nor the thistle, nor does
he forget the solitary blade of grass in the distant waste. He destroys
thoroughly and unceasingly. Everywhere we may see how he crushes to dust
plants and beasts, men and their works. Even the Egyptian pyramids, that
would seem to defy him, are trophies of his power,--monuments of decay,
graves of primeval kings.--_Heinrich Heine._

There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended, but has one vacant
chair!--_Longfellow._

And though mine arm should conquer twenty worlds, there's a lean fellow
beats all conquerors.--_Thomas Dekker._

Death is a commingling of eternity with time.--_Goethe._

To the Christian, whose life has been dark with brooding cares that
would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have
fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up
shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the serenity and
glory of heaven.--_Beecher._

That golden key that opes the palace