Go forth now! Be it into some other life: the divine breath is everywhere, even there.

Be it into forgetfulness for ever; at least thou wilt rest from the beating of sensible images upon thee, from the passions which pluck thee this way and that like an unfeeling toy, from those long marches of the intellect, from thy toilsome ministry to the flesh.
"Art thou yet more than dust and ashes and bare bone--a name only, or not so much as [209] that, which, also, is but whispering and a resonance, kept alive from mouth to mouth of dying abjects who have hardly known themselves; how much less thee, dead so long ago! "When thou lookest upon a wise man, a lawyer, a captain of war, think upon another gone.

When thou seest thine own face in the glass, call up there before thee one of thine ancestors--one of those old Caesars.
Lo! everywhere, thy double before thee! Thereon, let the thought occur to thee: And where are they?
anywhere at all, for ever?
And thou, thyself--how long?
Art thou blind to that thou art--thy matter, how temporal; and thy function, the nature of thy business?
Yet tarry, at least, till thou hast assimilated even these things to thine own proper essence, as a quick fire turneth into heat and light whatsoever be cast upon it.
"As words once in use are antiquated to us, so is it with the names that were once on all men's lips: Camillus, Volesus, Leonnatus: then, in a little while, Scipio and Cato, and then Augustus, and then Hadrian, and then Antoninus Pius.

How many great physicians who lifted wise brows at other men's sick-beds, have sickened and died! Those wise Chaldeans, who foretold, as a great matter, another man's last hour, have themselves been taken by surprise.

Ay! and all those others, in their pleasant places: those who doated on a Capreae like [210] Tiberius, on their gardens, on the baths: Pythagoras and Socrates, who reasoned so closely upon immortality: Alexander, who used the lives of others as though his own should last for ever--he and his mule-driver alike now!--one upon another.