, and that foolishly flout at their betters, undergo
just punishment. In the next place, none of the lovers of truth and the
contemplation of being have here their fill of them; they having but a
watery and puddled reason to speculate with, as it were, through the
fog and mist of the body; and yet they still look upwards like birds,
as ready to take their flight to the spacious and bright region, and
endeavor to make their souls expedite and light from things mortal,
using philosophy as a study for death. Thus I account death a truly
great and accomplished good thing; the soul being to live there a
real life, which here lives not a waking life, but suffers things most
resembling dreams. If then (as Epicurus saith) the remembrance of a
dead friend be a thing every way complacent; we may easily from thence
imagine how great a joy they deprive themselves of who think they do but
embrace and pursue the phantoms and shades of their deceased familiars,
that have in them neither knowledge nor sense, but who never expect
to be with them again, or to see their dear father and dear mother and
sweet wife, nor have any hopes of that familiarity and dear converse
they have that think of the soul with Pythagoras, Plato, and Homer. Now
what their sort of passion is like to was hinted at by Homer, when he
threw into the midst of the soldiers, as they were engaged, the shade
of Aeneas, as if he had been dead, and afterwards again presented his
friends with him himself,

Coming alive and well, as brisk as ever;

at which, he saith,

They all were overjoyed.
("Iliad," v. 514 and 515)

And should not we then,--when reason shows us that a real converse with
persons departed this life may be had, and that he that loves may both
feel and be with the party that affects and loves him,--relinquish these
men that cannot so much as cast off all those airy shades and outside
barks for which they are all their time in lamentation and fresh
afflictions?

Moreover, they that look upon death as the commencement of another and
better life, if they enjoy good things, are the better pleased with
them, as expecting much greater hereafter; but if they have not things
here to their minds, they do not much grumble at it, but the hopes of
those good and excellent things that are after death contain in them
such ineffable pleasures and expectances, that they wipe off and wholly
obliterate every defect and every offence from the mind, which,