Death
All, who have gone before you, have submitted to the stroke of death: all who after you shall undergo the same fate—the great and the good, the prince and the peasant, the renowned and the obscure, travel alike the road which leads to the grave. At the moment when you expire, thousands throughout the world shall, with you, be yielding up their breath. Can that be held to be a calamity which is common to you with everything that lives on earth-which is an event as much according to the course of nature as it is that leaves should fall in autumn, or that fruit should drop from the tree when it is fully ripe? “The pain of death cannot be very long, and is, probably less severe than what you have at other times experienced. The fear of death is more terrifying than death itself. It is due to the weakness of our imagination that it owes its chief power of dejecting the spirits, for, when the force of the mind is roused, there are few passions in our nature that have not been able to overcome the fear of death. Honour has defied death; love had despised it; shame has rushed upon it; revenge has disregarded it; grief has a thousand times wished for its approach. It is not strange that reason and virtue cannot give strength to surmount that fear, which, even in feeble minds, so many passions have conquered? What inconsistency is there in complaining so much of the evils of life, and being at the same time so afraid of what is to terminate them all; who can tell whether this further life might not teem with disasters and miseries as yet unknown, were it to be prolonged according to his wish?”
