death, and not the love of life, that causeth them to cling and stick so close to the body, hanging and clasping thereunto no otherwise than Ulysses to the wild fig-tree, when he feared with great horror the gulf Charybdis roaring under him:
Whereas the winds would not permit to stay.
Nor suffer him to row or sail away:
displeased infinitely in the one, and dreading fearfully the other. But he that in some measure (be it never so little) knoweth the nature of the soul, and casteth this with himself: That by death there is a passage out of this life, either to a better state, or at leastwise not to a worse: certes, he is furnished with no mean wayfaring provision to bring him to the security of mind in this life, I mean the fearless contempt of death: for he that may (so long as virtue and the better part of the soul (which indeed is proper unto man) is predominant) live pleasantly; and when the contrary passions, which are enemies to nature, do prevail, depart resolutely and without fear, saying thus unto himself:
God will me suffer to be gone
When that I will myself, anon.
What can we imagine to happen unto a man of this resolution, that should encumber, trouble or terrify him? for whosoever he was that said: I have prevented thee (O Fortune), I have stopped up all thy avenues, I have intercepted and choked all the ways of access and entry; surely he fortified himself, not with bars and barricades, not with locks and keys, nor yet with mures and walls, but with philosophical and sage lessons, with sententious saws, and with discourses of reason, whereof all men that are willing be capable. Neither ought a man to discredit the truth of these and such-like things which are committed in writing, and give no belief unto them, but rather to admire, and with an affectionate ravishment of spirit embrace and imitate them; yea, and withal to make a trial and experiment of himself; first in smaller matters, proceeding afterwards to greater, until he reach unto the highest, and in no wise to shake off such meditations, nor to shift off and seek to avoid the exercise of the mind in this kind, and in so doing, he shall haply find no such difficulty as he thinketh. For as the effeminate delicacy and niceness of our mind, amused always and loving to be occupied in the most easy objects, and retiring eftsoons from the cogitation of those things that fall out cross, unto such as tend unto greatest pleasure, causeth it to be soft and tender, and imprinteth a certain daintiness not able to abide any
