If the wisest of men hath compared
life to a span, surely we may be allowed to consider it as a day. It
is my fate to leave it in the evening; but those who are taken away
earlier have only lost a few hours, at the best little worth
lamenting, and much oftener hours of labour and fatigue, of pain and
sorrow. One of the Roman poets, I remember, likens our leaving life to
our departure from a feast;- a thought which hath often occurred to
me when I have seen men struggling to protract an entertainment, and
to enjoy the company of their friends a few moments longer. Alas!
how short is the most protracted of such enjoyments! how immaterial
the difference between him who retires the soonest, and him who
stays the latest! This is seeing life in the best view, and this
unwillingness to quit our friends is the most amiable motive from
which we can derive the fear of death; and yet the longest enjoyment
which we can hope for of this kind is of so trivial a duration, that
it is to a wise man truly contemptible. Few men, I own, think in
this manner; for, indeed, few men think of death till they are in
its jaws. However gigantic and terrible in object this may appear when
it approaches them, they are nevertheless incapable of seeing it at
any distance; nay, though they have been ever so much alarmed and
frightened when they have apprehended themselves in danger of dying,
they are no sooner cleared from this apprehension than even the
fears of it are erased from their minds.
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