Frigida quem semel est vitai pausa secuta.[461]

Nature herself might utter this reproof to all weak complaining: 'Thou fool, if thy life hath given thee joy, and all its blessings have not been poured into a leaky vessel, why dost thou not leave the feast like a satisfied guest, and take thy rest contentedly? But if all has hitherto been to thee vanity and vexation of spirit, why seek to add to thy trouble? I can devise or frame no new pleasure for thee. "There is no new thing under the sun"—"eadem sunt omnia semper."' To the weak complaint of age, Nature would speak with sterner voice: 'Away hence with thy tears and thy complainings. It is because, unable to enjoy the present, thou art ever weakly longing for what is absent, that death has come on thee unsatisfied.' 'This would be, indeed, a just charge and reproof. For the old order is ever yielding place to new; and life is given to no man in possession, to all men for use. The time before we were born is a mirror to us of what the future shall be. Is there any gloom or horror there? Is there not a deeper rest than any sleep?'

'The terrors of the unseen world are but the hell which fools make for themselves out of their passions[462]. The torments of Tantalus, of Tityus, of Sisyphus, and the Danaides, are but symbols of the blind cowardice and superstition, of the craving passions, of the ever-foiled and ever-renewed ambition, of the thankless discontent with the natural joy and beauty of the world, which curse and degrade our mortal existence. The stories of Cerberus and the Furies, and of the tortures of the damned are creations of a guilty conscience, or the projections into futurity of the experiences of earthly punishment.'

Other consolations are suggested by the thoughts of those who have gone before us. Echoing the stern irony of Achilles—

ἀλλὰ, φίλος, θάνε καὶ σύ· τίη ὀλοφύρεαι οὕτως;

κάτθανε καὶ Πάτροκλος, ὅπερ σέο πολλὸν ἀμείνων[463]—

he reminds us that better and greater men than we have died,—kings and soldiers, poets and philosophers, the mightiest equally with the humblest. In the spirit, and partly too in the words of Ennius, he enforces the thought that 'Scipio, the thunderbolt of war, the terror of Carthage, gave his bones to the earth as if he were the meanest slave.' 'Why, then, should one whose life is half a sleep, who is the prey of weak fears and restless discontent, complain that he too is subject to the common law? What is this wretched love of life, which makes us tremble at every danger? Death cannot be avoided; no new pleasure can be forged out by longer living. This evil of our lot is not inflicted by Nature, but by our own craving hearts, which cannot enjoy, and are yet ever thirsting for longer life[464].'

The power of the whole of this passage depends partly on the vividness of feeling and conception with which the thought is realised, partly on the august and solemn associations with which it is surrounded. Such graphic touches as these—

Frigida quem semel est vitai pausa secuta;[465]—

Cum summo gelidi cubat aequore saxi;[466]—