We sympathize duly with every instinct of nature; we all feel the love of life, and accord readily in the warmest expression of it; but we recoil from every strong exhibition of the fear of death as unreasonable and dastardly.
When Claudio reminds his noble sister that “death is a fearful thing,” she replies well—“and shamed life a hateful!” But when he rejoins—
“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;”
we anticipate her in bidding him “Perish! for a faithless coward, and a beast.”
In the same contemptible and shrinking spirit, Mæcenas, in a passage from Seneca—
“Vita, dum superest bene est
Hunc mihi vel acuta