Miscellanies Upon Various Subjects

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Reeves and Turner, 1890 - 301 pages

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Page 263 - Laws found the folly of prodigal blazes, and reduced undoing fires, unto the rule of sober obsequies, wherein few could be so mean as not to provide wood, pitch, a mourner, and an Urne.
Page 259 - The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the equinox?
Page 257 - ... of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs.
Page 259 - To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without a name than Herodias with one. And who had not rather have been the good thief than Pilate?
Page 265 - Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world...
Page 256 - What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism ; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial...
Page 261 - Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity.
Page 264 - Pyramids, arches, obelisks were but the irregularities of vainglory and wild enormities of ancient magnanimity. But the most magnanimous resolution rests in the Christian religion, which trampleth upon pride and sits on the neck of ambition, humbly pursuing that infallible perpetuity unto which all others must diminish their diameters and be poorly seen in angles of contingency.
Page 258 - To be read by bare inscriptions like many in Gruter, to hope for eternity by enigmatical epithets, or first letters of our names, to be studied by antiquaries, who we were, and have new names given us like many of the mummies, are cold consolations unto the students of perpetuity, even by everlasting languages.
Page 262 - In vain do individuals hope for immortality, or any patent from oblivion, in preservations below the moon : men have been deceived even in their flatteries above the sun, and studied conceits to perpetuate their names in heaven.

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