remains before the eyes. You find the love and affection of some creature a source of delight and joy to you: for how long? Until mutual love has grown cold, or sickness attacks the beloved one, or death removes him altogether. Then there is an end of all joy, and sorrow comes in its stead. Do you set your happiness in the possession of riches? Ah, how soon an unforeseen loss or an accident can put an end to it! And if you are spared that, death must inevitably come like a thief and steal everything from you at once; a wooden coffin will then be all that shall remain to you of all your earthly goods. “See,” says St. Augustine, “how fleeting that happiness is;”[1] the beginning of it is almost the end too.
Men would willingly make their happiness everlasting, or at least hand down their names to posterity. And that it is which embitters the apparent happiness of all the vain children of the world who seek after empty things, namely, that they cannot make everlasting the joys in which they take delight. We often think how happy that monarch must be who has everything his heart can desire, and abounds in pleasures day and night. And if it were as we imagine, would he not prize his honors, wealth, and pleasures much more if they were never to end, if no grave yawned for him, if he could remain as he is forever? But there is a sharp thorn that he must always wear inside his crown; all must come to an end in a short time. In order to satisfy in some measure this desire for an everlasting good, there are men who endeavor to hand down their names and renown to future generations. To that end beautiful palaces and pillars and triumphal arches are erected on which their pictures, names, and escutcheons are carved, so that after their bodies are decayed the lifeless stone may keep their memory green in after ages; others write books in order to secure immortality in the printed page; others leave their portraits behind them in medals of copper, silver, or gold, that after their death they may remain always in the memory of men.
But to no purpose, for after a time they are forgotten. But all this is of no good; for even the memory of men lasts but a short time on earth. “Their memory hath perished with a noise,”[2] says the Prophet David of such people; with the death-knell that tolls for their burial all remembrance of them is blotted out and vanished. That gentleman, that lady is dead, the people say; there is two, three, four days’ talk about them, and after that their names are not even mentioned. No one speaks of them again, and perhaps there may be two or three
