The Complaint of Nature Volume 36 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: birth is fraught with sorrow, trouble and pain consume their life, and the still more painful necessity of death ends even that pain. With them being is 5 a moment, life a shipwreck, the world a banishment. Their life is either gone, or pledges itself to go; moreover death is upon them, or threatens momently to arrive. Now from Pride is born a daughter, who possesses 7 by inheritance the malevolence of her mother. She is Envy, and by the gnawing rust of continual detraction she destroys the minds of men. She is the worm because of whose bite health of mind sickens and falls into disease, soundness of mind rots into decay, 75 rest of mind is abandoned for trouble. She is the guest who, after being lodged in her host's guest-chamber, pulls down the hospitable shelter. She is a possession which most evilly, nay dominatingly, possesses its possessor; for while she troubles others with blatant s obloquy, she disturbs more deeply with intestine fang the spirit of her possessor. She is Envy, who keeps the stings of her angry aspersions at rest as against those whom a hell of faults devours, those to whom the plan of nature denies the gifts of the body, those 5 whom mad fortune vomits into poverty. But if any one swims with Croesus in the flood of riches, scatters wealth with Titus, disputes over his image with Narcissus, thunders with Turnus in courage, rejoices with Hercules in strength, is drunken with the poetic nectar 9 of Homer, with Plato examines philosophy face to face, with Hippolytus is distinguished as the mirror of chastity?against such a one she discharges all the stings of her detractions. For she attributes bravery to the wildness of fear, distorts prudence into guile 95 and fraud, or into bombastic flatulence. Under her 1 Reading aculeos, with Migne. defamat...