God being all goodness, can love nothing but himself and the traduction of his holy spirit. Let us call to assize the loves of our parents, the affections of our wives and children, and they are all dumb shows and dreams, without reality, truth, or constancy. For, first, there is a strong bond of affection between us and our parents; yet how easily dissolved. We betake ourselves to a woman, forget our mother in a wife, and the womb that bare us in that that shall bear our image. This woman blessing us with children, our affection leaves the level it held before, and sinks from our bed unto our issue and picture of posterity, where affection holds no steady mansion. They, growing up in years, desire our ends; or, applying themselves to a woman, take a lawful way to love another better than ourselves. Thus I perceive a man may be buried alive, and behold his grave in his own issue. I conclude therefore and say, there is no happiness under (or, as Copernicus will have it, above) the sun, nor any crambe in that repeated verity and burthen of all the wisdom of Solomon, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit."\ There is no felicity in that the world adores. Aristotle, whilst he labors to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself; for his summum bonum" is a chimera, and there is no such thing as his felicity. That wherein God himself is happy, the holy angels are happy, in whose defect the devils are unhappy, that dare I call happiness. Whatsoever conduceth unto this may, with an easy metaphor, deserve that name. Whatsoever else the world terms happiness is to me a story out of Pliny, a tale of Boccace or Malizspini, an apparition or neat delusion, wherein there is no more of happiness than the name. Bless me in this life with but peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of thyself and my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Cæsar. These are, O Lord, the humble desires of my most reasonable ambition, and all I dare call happiness on earth; wherein I set no rule or limit to thy hand of providence. Dispose of me according to the wisdom of thy pleasure. Thy will be done, though in my own undoing. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. "I WONDER and admire his entireness in every subject that is before him. He follows it, he never wanders from it, and he has no occasion to wander; for whatever happens to be the subject, he metamorphoses all nature into it. In that treatise on some urns dug up in Norfolk, how earthy, how redolent of graves and sepulchres is ever line! You have now dark mould, now a thigh bone, now a skull, then a bit of a mouldered coffin, a fragment of an old tomb-stone with moss in its Hic Jacet,' a ghost, or a winding-sheet, or the echo of a funeral psalm wafted on a November wind; and the gayest thing you shall meet with shall be a silver nail or a gilt Anno Domini,' from a perished coffin-top." REMARKS ON THE HYDRIOTAPHIA. [The following remarks are extracted from an article in the Retrospective Review, Vol. I. p. 83.] "SIR THOMAS BROWNE, in the work before us, hath dared to take the grave itself for his theme. He deals not with death as a shadow, but as a substantial reality. He dwells not on it as the mere cessation of life; he treats it not as a terrible negation; but enters on its discussion as a state with its own solemnities and pomps. Others, who have professed to write on death, have treated merely of dying. They have fearfully described the rending asunder of soul and body, the last farewell to existence, and the state of the spirit in its range through new and untried scenes of rapture or of WO. Some have individualized the theme, and written of death in relation only to particular persons or classes who become its victims. Those who regard it more universally and intensely, as Blair and Young, yet look but on its surface. They are conversant only with cypresses, yew trees, and grave-stones, |