Hydriotaphia, Urne-buriall: Or, A Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk

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N. Douglas, 1927 - 202 pages

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Page 76 - Oblivion is not to be hired: the greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.
Page 79 - 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.
Page 67 - It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain.
Page 79 - While we look for incorruption in the heavens, we find they are but like the earth; — durable in their main bodies, alterable in their parts; whereof, beside comets and new stars, perspectives begin to tell tales, and the spots that wander about the sun, with Phaeton's favour, would make clear conviction.
Page 74 - We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh pyramids pillars of snow, and all that's past a moment.
Page 71 - Alcmena's nights, and time hath no wings unto it. But the most tedious being is that which can unwish itself, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the...
Page 67 - Adam had fallen lower, whereby by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the...
Page 81 - Sardanapalus; but the wisdom of funeral 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 urn. Five languages secured not the epitaph of Gordianus. The man of God lives longer without a tomb than any by one, invisibly interred by angels and adjudged to obscurity, though not without some marks directing human discovery.
Page 78 - Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.
Page 73 - To extend our memories by monuments, whose death we daily pray for and whose duration we cannot hope without injury to our expectations in the advent of the last day, were a contradiction to our beliefs. We whose generations are ordained in this setting...

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