These are my drowsy days: in vain
I do now wake to sleep again:
O come that hour when I shall never
Sleep again, but wake for ever.
"This is the dormitive I take to bedward. I need no other laudanum than
this to make me sleep; after which I close mine eyes in security, content
to take my leave of the sun, and sleep unto the resurrection."
Jeremy Taylor, born in 1613, was the most poetic of English
prose-writers: if he had written verse equal to his prose, he would have
had a lofty place amongst poets as well as amongst preachers. Taking the
opposite side from Milton, than whom he was five years younger, he was,
like him, conscientious and consistent, suffering while Milton's cause
prospered, and advanced to one of the bishoprics hated of Milton's soul
when the scales of England's politics turned in the other direction. Such
men, however, are divided only by their intellects. When men say, "I must
or I must not, for it is right or it is not right," then are they in
reality so bound together, even should they not acknowledge it
themselves, that no opposing opinions, no conflicting theories concerning
what is or is not right, can really part them. It was not wonderful that
a mind like that of Jeremy Taylor, best fitted for worshipping the beauty
of holiness, should mourn over the disrupted order of his church, or that
a mind like Milton's, best fitted for the law of life, should demand that
every part of that order which had ceased to vibrate responsive to every
throb of the eternal heart of truth, should fall into the ruin which its
death had preceded.
Pages:
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230