these, thinking to find some meaning in them that would bid me look into brighter prospects in the dark future. I, who have such a wretched life here, often try to make myself believe that there is a better life awaiting me elsewhere. I am about twenty-five years of age. I am heartily sick of life, and I live here only because I have not the courage to die. I flatter myself that I shall yet get courage. I have become misanthropical. I hate all things. How I wish that this solid globe was shattered into fragments, and I left alone to gaze upon the ruins. Now if you could show me that I have anything to live for, that there is anything better waiting me in the "big coming eternities," anything that would make me bear "the whips and scorns of time," I will ever remember your kindness with gratitude. I know no such hopes can be aught to me. It would have been much better that I had never been born. It is hard for me to confess all this to you-hard for me to confess it to myself. I will conclude, fearing that I have trespassed too far on your attention already. Though body changes, mind is forever. James Howell (1594(?)-1666) That the decay of passion strengthens philosophy, enabling men to grow calmly old. Lord Bolingbroke (1678-1751) A philosophy of old age. Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762) Upon knowing when to die. Horace Walpole (1717-1797) "What business had I to live to the brink of seventy-nine?" Horace Walpole (1717-1797) A foreshadowing of Mark Tapley. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) Death in old age. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) He hopes that his ego will survive. Robert Southey (1774-1843) Foreshadowings of the Ode on a Grecian Urn: that Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty—and that both are arrived at through sensation. The world can do without us. 66 John Keats (1795-1821) Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) I'll admire the wing of a cock sparrow as much as the pinion of an archangel." William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) Advice to the unmarried. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) That all men and women are but dust and ashes-a spark of divinity now and then kindling in the dull heap-that is all. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883) That man is lost in the antiquity of time. "We bid you to hope." James Smetham (1821-1889) He explains his religion of kindness. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) THOUGH BODY CHANGES, MIND IS FOREVER 1 James Howell to Dr. Francis Mansell Venice, July 1st, 1621. These wishes come to you from Venice, a place where there is nothing wanting that heart can wish; renowned Venice, the admired'st city in the world, a city that all Europe is bound unto, for she is her greatest rampart against that huge eastern tyrant, the Turk, by sea; else, I believe, he had overrun all Christendom by this time. Against him this city hath performed notable exploits, and not only against him, but divers others; she hath restored 1 James Howell was born in Carmarthenshire and educated at Oxford. His life was many-sided. He became steward to a patent-glass manufactory in whose interests he went abroad in 1619, to engage workmen and purchase materials, in the course of which journey he visited the great commercial centres of Holland, Flanders, France, Spain, and Italy. On his return, he abandoned business and became travelling companion to a young gentleman, with whom he revisited France. Later he was appointed secretary to Lord Scrope, President of The North, and in 1627 was elected to be one of the Parliamentary representatives of the Corporation of Richmond. Having written two small poems, complimentary to Charles I., he was, in 1640, awarded the clerkship of the council; of which position he was soon deprived, being imprisoned, by order of a committee of Parliament, in the Fleet, where he remained until the King's death. At the Restoration, he was appointed historiographer-royal, being the first to bear that title. His Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ, or Familiar Letters, from which the selections included in this book are taken, were first printed in 1645, and are amongst the earliest specimens of epistolary literature in our language. emperors to their thrones, and popes to their chairs, and with her galleys often preserved St. Peter's bark from sinking; for which, by way of reward, one of his successors espoused her to the sea, which marriage is solemnly renewed every year in solemn procession by the Doge and all the Clarissimos, and a gold ring cast into the sea out of the great Galeasse, called the Bucentoro, wherein the first ceremony was performed by the pope himself, above three hundred years since, and they say it is the self-same vessel still, though often put upon careen, and trimmed. This made me think, nay, I fell upon an abstracted notion in philosophy, and a speculation touching the body of man, which being in perpetual flux, and a kind of succession of decays, and consequently requiring, ever and anon, a restoration of what it loseth of the virtue of the former aliment, and what was converted after the third concoction into a blood and fleshly substance, which, as in all other sublunary bodies that have internal principles of heat, useth to transpire, breathe out, and waste away through invisible pores, by exercise, motion, and sleep, to make room still for a supply of new nurriture: I fell, I say, to consider whether our bodies may be said to be of like condition with this Bucentoro, which, though it be reputed still the same vessel, yet I believe there's not a foot of that timber remaining which it had upon the first dock, having been, as they tell me, so often planked and ribbed, calked and pieced. In like manner, our bodies may be said to be daily repaired by new sustenance, which begets new blood and consequently new spirits, new humours, and, I may say, new flesh; the old, by continued deperdition and insensible perspirations, evaporating still out of us, and giving way to fresh; so that I make a question whether, by reason of these perpetual reparations and accretions, the body of man may be said to be the same numerical body in his old |