The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson by Stephen Coleridge
page 16 of 149 (10%)
page 16 of 149 (10%)
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nineteenth century was its restraint.
Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control. The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the noble mastery of himself. When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly magnifical--to use the old Bible word. "For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him. Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you. "I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. "Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me away. |
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