taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die
were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, 'Why then he
did not die?' 'Because,' said he, 'it is indifferent.'--[Diogenes
Laertius, i. 35.]--Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of
this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are
of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to
thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the
cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards
death; the last only arrives at it." These are the good lessons our
mother Nature teaches.

I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war
the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others,
should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own
houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining
milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be,
notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of
people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it
is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out,
that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of
living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of
astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering
servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed
with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror
round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid
even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor;
and so 'tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as
from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but
the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day
or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that