"Men," says St. Augustine, "travel far to climb high mountains, to observe the majesty of the ocean, to trace the sources of rivers, but they neglect themselves." "Admirable reasoning! admirable lesson!" exclaimed Petrarch, as he closed the Confessions upon the passage when on the summit of the Alps. "If," said he, "I have undergone so much labor in climbing this mountain that my body might be nearer to heaven, what ought I not to do in order that my soul may be received into those immortal regions?"
Hear this lofty strain of the old heathen emperor, Marcus Aurelius: "Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to live as men do."
"As soon as a man," says Max Müller, "becomes conscious of himself as distinct from all other things and persons, he at the same moment becomes conscious of a Higher Self, a higher power, without which he feels that neither he nor anything else would have any life or reality."
"To live, indeed," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is to be again ourselves, which being not only a hope but an evidence in noble believers, 'tis all one to lie in St. Innocent's church-yard, as in the sands of Egypt; ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of Adrianus."
"At the age of seventy-five," said Goethe, "one must, of course, think frequently of death. But this thought never gives me the least uneasiness, I am so fully convinced that the soul is indestructible, and that its activity will continue through eternity. It is like the sun, which seems to our earthly eyes to set in night, but is in reality gone to diffuse its light elsewhere."
"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light thro' chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view
That stand upon the threshold of the new."
Amongst the poems of Mrs. Barbauld is a stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. Madame D'Arblay told the poet Rogers that she repeated it every night. Wordsworth once said to a visitor, "Repeat me that stanza by Mrs. Barbauld." His friend did so. Wordsworth made him repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal, with his hands behind him, and was heard to mutter to himself, "I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines."
"Life! we've been long together,
Thro' pleasant and thro' cloudy weather:
'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,
Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear:
Then steal away, give little warning,
Choose thine own time;
Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime
Bid me good-morning."