Then long eternity shall greet our bliss
With an individual kiss,
And joy shall overtake us like a flood.
Milton, On Time.
Anacreon,
My individual companion.
Holyday, Marriages of the Arts, act ii. sc. 6.
Indolence. ‘Indolentia’ was a word first invented by Cicero, when he was obliged to find some equivalent for the ἀπάθεια of certain Greek schools. That it was not counted one of his happiest coinages we may conclude from the seldom use of it by any other authors but himself, as also from the fact that Seneca, a little later proposing ‘impatientia’ as the Latin equivalent for ἀπάθεια, implied that none such had hitherto been found. The word has taken firmer root in English than it ever did in Latin. At the same time, meaning as it does now a disposition or temper of languid non-exertion, it has lost the accuracy of use which it had in the philosophical schools, where it signified a state of freedom from passion and pain; which signification it retained among our own writers of the Caroline period, and even later. To this day, indeed, surgeons call certain painless swellings ‘indolent tumours.’
Now, to begin with fortitude, they say it is the mean between cowardice and rash audacity, of which twain the one is a defect, the other an excess of the ireful passion; liberality between niggardise and prodigality, clemency and mildness between senseless indolence and cruelty.—Holland, Plutarch’s Morals, p. 69.
Now though Christ were far from both, yet He came nearer to an excess of passion than to an indolency, to a senselessness, to a privation of natural affections. Inordinateness of affections may sometimes make some men like some beasts; but indolency, absence, emptiness, privation of affections, makes any man, at all times, like stones, like dirt.—Donne, Sermons, 1640, p. 156.