_Life and Death_ (Vol. ix., p. 296.).--What is death but a sleep? We shall
awake refreshed in the morning. Thus Psalm xvii. 15.; Rom. vi. 5. For the
full meanings, see these passages in the original tongues. Sir Thomas
Browne, whose _Hydriotaphia_ abounds with quaint and beautiful allusions to
this subject, says, in one place, "Sleep is so like death, that I dare not
trust him without my prayers:" and he closes his learned treatise with the
following sentence:
"To live indeed is to be again ourselves; which being not only a hope,
but an evidence in noble believers, it is all one to lie in St.
Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt; ready to be anything in
the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six feet as the moles of
Adrianus."
"Tabesne cadavera solvat,
An rogus, haud refert."--_Lucan._
How fine also is that philosophical sentiment of Lucan:
"Victurosque Dei celant, ut vivere durent,
Felix esse mori."
Can any of your correspondents say in what work the following analogous
passage occurs, and who is the author of it? The stamp of thought is rather
of the philosophic pagan than the Christian, though the latinity is more
monkish than classic:
"Emori nolo, sed me esse mortuum, nihil curo."