nts of which nature herself, and thou too, art compacted.
She changes without murmuring. The oaken chest falls to pieces with no
more complaining than when the carpenter fitted it together. If one
told thee certainly that on the morrow thou shouldst die, or at the
furthest on the day after, it would be no great matter to thee to die
on the day after to-morrow, rather than to-morrow. Strive to think it
a thing no greater that thou wilt die--not to-morrow, but a year, or
two years, or ten years from to-day.

"I find that all things are now as they were in the days of our buried
ancestors--all things sordid in their elements, trite by long usage,
and yet ephemeral. How ridiculous, then, how like a countryman in
town, is he, who wonders at aught. Doth the sameness, the repetition
of the public shows, weary thee? Even so doth that likeness of events
in the spectacle of the world. And so must it be with thee to the end.
For the wheel of the world hath ever the same [208] motion, upward and
downward, from generation to generation. When, when, shall time give
place to eternity?

"If there be things which trouble thee thou canst put them away,
inasmuch as they have their being but in thine own notion concerning
them. Consider what death is, and how, if one does but detach from it
the appearances, the notions, that hang about it, resting the eye upon
it as in itself it really is, it must be thought of but as an effect of
nature, and that man but a child whom an effect of nature shall
affright. Nay! not function and effect of nature, only; but a thing
profitable also to herself.

"To cease from action--the ending of thine effort to think and do:
there is no evil in that. Turn thy thought to the ages of man's life,
boyhood, youth, maturity, old age: the change in every one of these
also is a dying, but evil nowhere. Thou climbedst into the ship, thou
hast made thy voyage and touched the shore. Go forth now! Be it into
some other life: the divine breath is everywhere, even there. Be it
into forgetfulness for ever; at least thou wilt rest from the beating
of sensible images upon thee, from the passions which pluck thee this
way and that like an unfeeling toy, from those long marches of the
intellect, from thy toilsome ministry to the flesh.

"Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare bone--a name only, or
not so much as [209] that, which, also, is but whispering and a
resonance, kept alive from mouth to mouth of