Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of “wholesome discipline” than to the deadly sickness. He says, “The well-known proverb, ‘The devil was sick,’ etc., shows how generally it has been observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief, is, that it is so much easier to recall exactly the sensations felt when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again, as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much affects the mind along with the body.”
And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a “poem” to the subject; and a greater poet—if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning
“Of seamen’s fates, and the loud tempests raise
The waters, and repentance for past sinning
In all who o’er the great deep take their ways:
They vow to amend their lives, and yet they don’t;
Because, if drown’d, they can’t—if spar’d, they won’t.”
SLEEP AND DEATH.
St. John xi. 11-14.