Imagine howling!—’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
In all these apprehensions of Claudio there is no thought of annihilation. What if he had seen death as an eternal sleep? Let Hamlet answer:—
To die,—to sleep;—
No more;—and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation