Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary (Henry Purcell, 1695)
Keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favours or afflictions.
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson , Chapter XLVI
The Princess and Pekuah Visit the Astronomer.
Hymn
Tune : Dear Lord and Father of Mankind (Repton)
Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In deeper reverence, praise
In deeper reverence, praise..
Hymns
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;Hymns
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.
The beauty of Thy peace.
Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm!
O still, small voice of calm!
Words taken from a longer poem, The Brewing of Soma by American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier, adapted by Garrett Horder in his 1884 Congregational HymnsÂ
Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life does greatly please.
Edmund Spenser, 1590, Faerie Queen c.ix.xi
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
From A Man Young And Old: XI. From Oedipus At Colonus , William Butler Yeats
Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.
Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus
Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o' the great;
Thou art past the tyrant's stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The sceptre, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finished joy and moan;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, act 4, scene 2
More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.
Orlando Gibbons, First Set of Madrigals and Motets of 5 parts (1612).