But fathers--because they design to have their children wise and valiant, apt for counsel or for arms--send them to severe governments, and tie them to study, to hard labor, and afflictive contingencies. They rejoice when the bold boy strikes a lion with his hunting-spear, and shrinks not when the beast comes to affright his early courage. Softness is for slaves and beasts, for minstrels and useless persons, for such who can not ascend higher than the state of a fair ox or a servant entertained for vainer offices; but the man that designs his son for nobler employments--to honors and to triumphs, to consular dignities and presidencies of councils--loves to see him pale with study or panting with labor, hardened with suffrance or eminent by dangers. And so God dresses us for heaven: he loves to see us struggling with a disease, and resisting the devil, and contesting against the weaknesses of nature, and against hope to believe in hope--resigning ourselves to God's will, praying Him to choose for us, and dying in all things but faith and its blest consequents; _ut ad officium cum periculo sinus prompti_--and the danger and the resistance shall endear the office. For so have I known the boisterous north wind pass through the yielding air, which opened its bosom, and appeased its violence by entertaining it with easy compliance in all the region of its reception; but when the same breath of heaven hath been checked with the stiffness of a tower, or the united strength of a wood, it grew mighty and dwelt there, and made the highest branches stoop and make a smooth path for it on the top of all its glories. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 89: From the "Rules and Exercises of Holy Dying."] ABRAHAM COWLEY Born in 1618, died in 1667; son of a stationer; educated at Cambridge and Oxford; identified himself with the Royalists; fled with the Queen to France in 1646; returned to England in 1656, settled afterward at Chertsey; highly esteemed in his own day as a poet; his works first collected in 1668. I OF OBSCURITY[90] What a brave privilege is it to be free from all contentions, from all envying or being envied, from receiving and from paying all kind of ceremonies! It is, in my mind, a very delightful pastime for two good and agreeable friends to travel up and down together, in places where they are by nobody known, nor know anybody. It was the ease of AEneas and his Achates, when they walked invisibly about the fields and streets of Carthage. Venus herself A veil of thickened air around them cast, That none might know, or see them, as they passed. VIRG.1 _AEn._