VIRTUE. Sweet day! so cool, so calm, so bright, The dews shall weep thy fall to-night; Sweet rose! whose hue, angry and brave, Thy root is ever in its grave; And thou must die. Sweet spring! full of sweet days and roses; A box where sweets compacted lie; Thy music shows ye have your closes; And all must die. Only a sweet and virtuous soul, But, though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives. Herbert. MENTAL BEAUTY. Mind, mind alone, bear witness earth and heaven! Of beauteous and sublime: here hand in hand, Celestial Venus, with divinest airs, Look then abroad through nature, to the range When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud Of innocence and love protect the scene. Akenside. THE WILES OF CRAFT. What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware, By which deceit doth mask in vizard fair: To seem like truth, whose shape she well can feign, The guiltless mind with guile to entertain. Spenser. TOMBS. Tombs are the clothes of the dead: a grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered. Tombs ought in some sort to be proportioned, not to the wealth, but to the deserts of the party interred. There were officers appointed in the Grecian games, who always by public authority did pluck down the statues erected to the victors, if they exceeded the true symmetry and proportion of their bodies. We need such now-a-days to order monuments to men's merits, chiefly to reform such depopulating tombs as have no good fellowship with them, but engross all the room, leaving neither seats for the living, nor graves for the dead. It was a wise and thrifty law which Reutha King of Scotland made, that noblemen should have so many pillars or long-pointed stones set in their sepulchres, as they had slain enemies in the wars. If the order were also enlarged to those who in peace had excellently deserved of the church or commonwealth, it might well be revived. The shortest, plainest, and truest epitaphs are best. I say the shortest, for when a passenger sees a chronicle written on a tomb, he takes it in trust some great man lies there buried, without taking pains to examine who it is. Mr Cambden, in his "Remains," presents us with examples of great men that had little epitaphs. And when once a witty gentleman was asked what epitaph was fitted to be written on Mr Cambden's tomb, let it be, said he, "Cambden's Remains." I say also the plainest: for, except the sense lie above ground, few will trouble themselves to dig for it. Lastly, it must be true, not, as in some monuments, where the red veins in the marble may seem to blush at the falsehoods written on it. He was a witty man who first taught a stone to speak, but he was a wicked man that taught it first to lie. A good memory is the best monument: others are subject to casualty and time; and we know that the Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the power of their founders. Let us be careful to provide rest for our souls, and our bodies will provide rest for themselves. Thomas Fuller. Ah me! how many perils do enfold The righteous man, to make him daily fall: Were not that heavenly grace did him behold, Spenser. Great God, whom we with humbled thoughts adore, Eternal, infinite, almighty king, Whose dwellings heaven transcend, whose throne before Archangels serve, and seraphim do sing: Of nought who wrought all that with wond'ring eyes We do behold within this various round; Who makes the rocks to rock, to stand the skies; Wash off those spots, which still in conscience' glass, |