Live happy in the Elysium of a virtuously composed mind, and let intellectual contents exceed the delights wherein mere pleasurists place their paradise.  Bear not too slack reins upon pleasure, nor let complexion or contagion betray thee unto the exorbitancy of delight.  Make pleasure thy recreation or intermissive relaxation, not thy Diana, life, and profession.  Voluptuousness is as insatiable as covetousness.  Tranquillity is better than jollity, and to appease pain than to invent pleasure.  Our hard entrance into the world, our miserable going out of it, our sicknesses, disturbances, and sad rencounters in it, do clamorously tell us we came not into the world to run a race of delight, but to perform the sober acts and serious purposes of man; which to omit were foully to miscarry in the advantage of humanity, to play away an uniterable life, and to have lived in vain.  Forget not the capital end, and frustrate not the opportunity of once living.  Dream not of any kind of metempsychosis or transanimation, but into thine own body, and that after a long time; and then also unto wail or bliss, according to thy first and fundamental life.  Upon a curricle in this world depends a long course of the next, and upon a narrow scene here an endless expansion hereafter.  In vain some think to have an end of their beings with their lives.  Things cannot get out of their natures, or be, or not be, in despite of their constitutions.  Rational existences in heaven perish not at all, and but partially on earth; that which is thus once, will in some way be always; the first living human soul is still alive, and all Adam hath found no period.

Since the stars of heaven do differ in glory; since it hath pleased the Almighty hand to honor the north pole with lights above the south; since there are some stars so bright that they can hardly be looked upon, some so dim that they can scarcely be seen, and vast numbers not to be seen at all even by artificial eyes; read thou the earth in heaven and things below from above.  Look contentedly upon the scattered difference of things, and expect not equality in lustre, dignity, or perfection, in regions or persons below; where numerous numbers must be content to stand like lacteous or nebulous stars, little taken notice of, or dim in their generations.  All which may be contentedly allowable in the affairs and ends of this world, and in suspension unto what will be in the order of things hereafter, and the new system of mankind which will be in the world to come; when the last may be the first, and the first the last; when Lazarus may sit above Caesar, and the just, obscure on earth, shall shine like the sun in heaven; when personations shall cease, and histrionism of happiness be over; when reality shall rule, and all shall be as they shall be forever.

FROM ‘HYDRIOTAPHIA, OR URN-BURIAL’