"When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who has
learnt to die, has forgot to serve.  There is nothing of evil in life
for him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how to
die delivers us from all subjection and constraint.  _Paulus Aemilius_
answered him whom the miserable _king of Macedon_, his prisoner, sent
to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, '_Let him
make that request to himself_.'  In truth, in all things, if nature do
not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform
anything to purpose.  I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, but
thoughtful; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained
myself withal than the imaginations of death, even in the gayest and
most wanton time of my age.  In the company of ladies, and in the
height of mirth, some have perhaps thought me possessed of some
jealousy, or meditating upon the uncertainty of some imagined hope,
whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one
surprised a few days before with a burning fever, of which he died,
returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idle
fancies of love and jollity, as mine was then; and for aught I knew,
the same destiny was attending me.  Yet did not this thought wrinkle my
forehead any more than any other." . . . . "Why dost thou fear this
last day?  It contributes no more to thy destruction than every one of
the rest.  The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does but
confer it.  Every day travels toward 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 as to our own particular
danger, or that of another--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 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 others of better
quality and education; and I do verily believe, 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 astonished and
affected friends, the attendance of pale and blubbered servants, a dark
room set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physicians
and divines; in fine, nothing but ghostliness and horror round about
us, render it so formidable, that a man almost fancies himself dead and
buried already.  Children are afraid even of those they love best, and
are best acquainted with, when disguised in a vizor, and so are we; the
vizor must be removed as well from things as persons; which 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 or concern." [1]