And shake at shadows fanciful and vain, As those which in the breasts of children reign. These bugbears of the mind, this inward hell, No rays of outward sunshine can dispel; But nature and right reason must display Their beams abroad, and bring the darksome soul to-day. THE LATTER PART OF THE THIRD BOOK OF LUCRETIUS. AGAINST THE FEAR OF DEATH. What has this bugbear, death, to frighten men, If souls can die, as well as bodies can? For, as before our birth we felt no pain, When Punic arms infested land and main, When heaven and earth were in confusion hurled, For the debated empire of the world, Which awed with dreadful expectation lay, Sure to be slaves, uncertain who should sway: So, when our mortal flame shall be disjoined, The lifeless lump uncoupled from the mind, From sense of grief and pain we shall be free; We shall not feel, because we shall not be. Though earth in seas, and seas in heaven were lost, We should not move, we only should be tost. Nay, even suppose, when we have suffered fate, The soul could feel in her divided state. What's that to us? for we are only we, While souls and bodies in one frame agree. Nay, though our atoms should revolve by chance, And matter leap into the former dance; Though time our life and motion could restore, And make our bodies what they were before; What gain to us would all this bustle bring? The new-made man would be another thing. When once an interrupting pause is made, That individual being is decayed. We, who are dead and gone, shall bear no part In all the pleasures, nor shall feel the smart, Which to that other mortal shall accrue, Whom of our matter time shall mould anew. For backward if you look on that long space Of ages past, and view the changing face Of matter, tost, and variously combined In sundry shapes, 'tis easy for the mind From thence to infer, that seeds of things have been In the same order as they now are seen; Which yet our dark remembrance cannot trace, Because a pause of life, a gaping space, Has come betwixt, where memory lies dead, And all the wandering motions from the sense are fled. For, whosoe'er shall in misfortunes live, Must _be_, when those misfortunes shall arrive; And since the man who _is_ not, feels not woe, (For death exempts him, and wards off the blow, Which we, the living, only feel and bear,) What is there left for us in death to fear? When once that pause of life has come between, 'Tis just the same as we had never been. And, therefore, if a man bemoan his lot, That after death his mouldering limbs shall rot, Or flames, or jaws of beasts devour his mass, Know, he's an unsincere, unthinking ass. A secret sting remains within his mind; The fool is to his own cast offals kind.