orment myself and re-assure,
For the loss, in suffering and in expectation.
With sour, with bitter and with sweet
Experience, the fruits, and hope,
Threatens, afflict, and comforts me.
The age I lived, do live and am to live,
Affrights me, shakes me and upholds
In absence, presence and in prospect.
Much, too much and sufficient
Of the past, of now, and of to come,
Put me in fear, in anguish and in hope.

CES. This is precisely the humour of a furious lover, though the same
may be said of nearly all mortals who are seriously affected in any way.
We cannot say that this accords with all conditions in a general way,
but only with those mortals who were, and who are, wretched. So that to
him who sought a kingdom and obtained it, belongs the fear of losing the
same; and to one who has laboured to secure the fruits of love, such as
the special grace of the beloved, belongs the tooth of jealousy and
suspicion. Thus, too, with the states of the world; when we find
ourselves in darkness and in adversity we may surely prophecy light and
prosperity, and when we are in a state of happiness and discipline,
doubtless we have to expect the advent of ignorance and distress. As in
the case of Hermes Trismegistus, who, seeing Egypt in all the splendour
of the sciences and of occultism, so that he considered that men were
consorting with gods and spirits and were in consequence most pious, he
made that prophetic lament to Asclepios, saying that the darkness of new
religions and cults must follow, and that of the then present things
nothing would remain but idle tales and matter for condemnation. So the
Hebrews, when they were slaves in Egypt, and banished to the deserts,
were comforted by their prophets with the hope of liberty and the
re-acquisition of their country; when they were in authority and
tranquillity they were menaced with dispersion and captivity. And as in
these days there is no evil nor injury to which we are not subject, so
there is no good nor honour that we may not promise ourselves. Thus does
it happen to all the other generations and states, the which, if they
endure and be not destroyed entirely by the force of vicissitude, it is
inevitable that from evil they come to good, from good to evil, from low
estate to high, from high to low, out of obscurity into splendour, out
of splendour into obscurity, for this is the natural order of things;
outside of which order, if another s