hall endear the office. For so have I known the boisterous
north wind pass through the yielding air, which opened its bosom, and
appeased its violence by entertaining it with easy compliance in all
the region of its reception; but when the same breath of heaven hath
been checked with the stiffness of a tower, or the united strength of
a wood, it grew mighty and dwelt there, and made the highest branches
stoop and make a smooth path for it on the top of all its glories.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 89: From the "Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying."]

ABRAHAM COWLEY

Born in 1618, died in 1667; son of a stationer; educated at
Cambridge and Oxford; identified himself with the Royalists;
fled with the Queen to France in 1646; returned to England
in 1656, settled afterward at Chertsey; highly esteemed in
his own day as a poet; his works first collected in 1668.

I

OF OBSCURITY[90]

What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all
envying or being envied, from receiving and from paying all kind of
ceremonies! It is, in my mind, a very delightful pastime for two good
and agreeable friends to travel up and down together, in places where
they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the ease of AEneas
and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and
streets of Carthage. Venus herself

A veil of thickened air around them cast,
That none might know, or see them, as they passed.

VIRG.1 _AEn._

The common story of Demosthenes's confession, that he had taken great
pleasure in hearing of a tanker-woman say, as he passed: "This is that
Demosthenes," is wonderfully ridiculous from so solid an orator. I
myself have often met with that temptation to vanity, if it were any;
but am so far from finding it any pleasure, that it only makes me run
faster from the place, till I get, as it were, out of sight-shot.
Democritus[91] relates, and in such a manner as if he gloried in the
good fortune and commodity of it, that, when he came to Athens, nobody
there did so much as take notice of him; and Epicurus lived there very
well, that is, lay hid many years in his gardens, so famous since that
time, with his friend Metrodorus: after whose death, making, in one of
his letters, a kind commemoration of the happiness which they two had
enjoyed together, he adds at last that he thought it no disparagement
to those great felicities of their life, that, in the