And wilt thou make thy treasure of any one of these things?
It were as if one set his love upon the swallow, as it passeth out of sight through the air! "Bethink thee often, in all contentions public and private, of those whom men have remembered by reason of their anger and vehement spirit--those famous rages, and the occasions of them--the great fortunes, and misfortunes, of men's strife of old.

What are they all now, and the dust of their battles?
Dust [206] and ashes indeed; a fable, a mythus, or not so much as that.

Yes! keep those before thine eyes who took this or that, the like of which happeneth to thee, so hardly; were so querulous, so agitated.

And where again are they?
Wouldst thou have it not otherwise with thee?
Consider how quickly all things vanish away--their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts.

Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life--a pigmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave.
"Let death put thee upon the consideration both of thy body and thy soul: what an atom of all matter hath been distributed to thee; what a little particle of the universal mind.