ature 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 hath 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 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. Calentures and surfeit, cold and
agues, are the four quarters of the year; and you can go no whither,
but you tread upon a dead man's bones.

The wild fellow in Petronius, that escaped upon a broken table from
the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky
shore, espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted
with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy,
the sea, towards the shore to find a grave. And it cast him into some
sad thoughts, that peradventure this man's wife, in some part of the
continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's return;
or, it may be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father
thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old
man's cheek, ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy
to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the
circle of his father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals; this
is the end and sum of all their designs. A dark night and an ill
guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough
wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that
shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered into the
storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. T