At the age of sixty-six he wrote his last book, and returned to the
quiet contemplative life which suited him so well, and he says that he
never had enjoyed so long a period of serene light and inward happiness;
but clouds began to gather in his mind--in reality it was the failing
body, but he attributed it to the mind, and was rather unhappy about
himself. He was then attacked by a kind of low fever, and fainted one
evening in the Combination Room after supper: however, as a healthy man
is apt to do, he paid no attention to this, but he found himself growing
weaker. Once pathetically, as he sat talking in his room, he spread out
his hands in the sun; they were thin and delicate with growing weakness.
"My body," he said, "is strangely run out." He then began to suffer from
sleeplessness; for weeks together he could get no rest. "I thought I
should have died laughing," he said to Dr. Ward, "but I find myself like
a fish out of its element, that lies tumbling in the dust of the
street." Then, after a pause: "I am but the remains of an ordinary man."
His mind began to fail him; he could no longer read or think. He said to
Dr. Davies, an old friend, that some one had said to him that this, if
known, might prejudice his writings; "but," he added, "I have read of a
person, an excellent mathematician, who at last came to dote, but none
will say that any of his former demonstrations were any the worse for
that."
At last he got very weary of the weakness and the long strain. "Never
any person," he said, "ever thirsted more after his meat and drink than
I do for a release from the body. Yet," he added, "I deserved greater
afflictions from the hand of God than those I have met with."
He dwelt much on the next world. "I am glad to think when I am gone," he
said, "that I shall still converse with this world in my writings. But
it is a greater satisfaction to me that I am going to those with whom I
shall be as well acquainted in a quarter of an hour as if I had known
them many years."
The day before he died an old friend came to see him. Henry More was
very silent, but at last broke out: "Doctor, I have marvellous things
to tell you." "Sir," said the other, "you are full, I suppose, of Divine
joy." "Full," he said, with tears in his eyes. The other saw he was so
extremely weak that he forebore to question him further. When his nephew
came to see him in the evening, he said that he should soon be gone. "I
am going to play you no tricks," he added; "I am not going to trot and
loll and hang on."
The next morning he understood that he had only a few hours to live. "O
praeclarum illum diem!" he said, quoting from Cicero. They were almost
his last words. He died as the day was dawning, so quietly that the
nurse who sat by him did not know when the passage was. He was laid to
rest in the College Chapel, having just entered upon his seventy-third
year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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