OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING

Let me curiously analyse eternal farewells, and the last pressures of loving hands.  Let me smile at faces bewept, and the nodding plumes and slow paces of funerals.  Let me write down brave heroical sentences—­sentences that defy death, as brazen Goliath the hosts of Israel.

“When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him.  The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who has learnt to die, has forgot to serve.  There is nothing of evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus Aemilius answered him whom the miserable king of Macedon, his prisoner, sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, ’Let him make that request to himself.’  In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose.  I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, but thoughtful; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than the imaginations of death, even in the gayest and most wanton time of my age.  In the company of ladies, and in the height of mirth, some have perhaps thought me possessed of some jealousy, or meditating upon the uncertainty of some imagined hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one surprised a few days before with a burning fever, of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then; and for aught I knew, the same destiny was attending me.  Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other.” . . . .  “Why dost thou fear this last day?  It contributes no more to thy destruction than every one of the rest.  The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does but confer it.  Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives at it.  These are the good lessons our mother nature teaches.  I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war the image of death—­whether we look upon it as to our own particular danger, or that of another—­should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it were not so, it would be an army of whining milksops,) and that being still in all places the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of people, than others of better quality and education; and I do verily believe, that it is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living, the cries of mothers, wives and children, the visits of astonished and affected friends, the attendance of pale and blubbered servants, a dark room set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physicians