Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this:
“Then did I see how that presentient shroud
Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint
In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud.
Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint.
And the struck spirit utterly would faint,
Hurl’d from full joy.”
To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, “whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days.” In another of his works the fine old physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, “think of sullen vicissitudes,” but beat not our brains to foreknow them. “Be armed against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-knowledge. The knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms, and so by an ambiguous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His disciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto Jeremy before it was besieged.” Holy George Herbert is scarcely more quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose:
“Only the present is thy part and fee.
And happy thou,