Religio Medici: To which is Added Hydriotaphia, Or Urn-burial; a Discourse on Sepulchral Urns

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H. Washbourne, 1841 - 266 pages

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Page 78 - He who hath bent him o'er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled, The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress...
Page 254 - In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories, when to be unknown was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection.
Page 64 - See, thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth, All matter quick, and bursting into birth. Above, how high progressive life may go! Around, how wide! how deep extend below! Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures aethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach; from infinite to thee, From thee to nothing.
Page 260 - But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian's horse, confounded that of himself.
Page 258 - And therefore, restless inquietude for the diuturnity of our memories unto present considerations seems a vanity almost out of date, and superannuated piece of folly. We cannot hope to live so long in our names, as some have done in their persons. One face of Janus holds no proportion unto the other. Tis too late to be ambitious.
Page 25 - The world was made to be inhabited by beasts, but studied and contemplated by man : 'tis the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts : without this, the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world.
Page 139 - We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps ; and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason ; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps.
Page 265 - Pious spirits who passed their days in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, than the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the chaos of pre-ordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kiss of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world...
Page 258 - We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time are providentially taken off from such imaginations; and, being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration which maketh pyramids pillars of snow and all that's past a moment.
Page 258 - There is no antidote against the opium of time, which temporally considereth all things : our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors.

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