of obliviousness, and doteth. Her
ancient civility is gone, and her glory hath vanished as a phantasma.
Her youthful days are over, and her face hath become wrinkled and
tetric. She poreth not upon the heavens; astronomy is dead unto her, and
knowledge maketh other cycles. Canopus is afar off, Memnon resoundeth
not to the sun, and Nilus heareth strange voices. Her monuments are but
hieroglyphically sempiternal. Osiris and Anubis, her averruncous
deities, have departed, while Orus yet remains dimly shadowing the
principle of vicissitude and the effluxion of things, but receiveth
little oblation.

FROM 'A LETTER TO A FRIEND'

He was willing to quit the world alone and altogether, leaving no
earnest behind him for corruption or after-grave, having small content
in that common satisfaction to survive or live in another, but amply
satisfied that his disease should die with himself, nor revive in a
posterity to puzzle physic, and make sad mementos of their parent
hereditary....

In this deliberate and creeping progress unto the grave, he was somewhat
too young and of too noble a mind to fall upon that stupid symptom,
observable in divers persons near their journey's end, and which may be
reckoned among the mortal symptoms of their last disease; that is, to
become more narrow-minded, miserable, and tenacious, unready to part
with anything when they are ready to part with all, and afraid to want
when they have no time to spend; meanwhile physicians, who know that
many are mad but in a single depraved imagination, and one prevalent
decipiency, and that beside and out of such single deliriums a man may
meet with sober actions and good sense in Bedlam, cannot but smile to
see the heirs and concerned relations gratulating themselves on the
sober departure of their friends; and though they behold such mad
covetous passages, content to think they die in good understanding, and
in their sober senses.

Avarice, which is not only infidelity but idolatry, either from covetous
progeny or questuary education, had no root in his breast, who made good
works the expression of his faith, and was big with desires unto public
and lasting charities; and surely, where good wishes and charitable
intentions exceed abilities, theorical beneficency may be more than a
dream. They build not castles in the air who would build churches on
earth; and though they leave no such structures here, may lay good
foundations in heaven. In brief, his life