English Prose Selections Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: ...against the impetuous tides of ignorance and false apprehensions which overflow thy banks and hurry thee headlong down the stream, whilst thou are imprisoned in thy clayey mansion, we have with much ado arrived at some little atom of thy vast greatness; and with the hard and tough blows of strict and wary reasoning we have stricken out some few sparkles of that glorious light which environeth and swelleth thee, or, rather, which is thee: it is high time I should retire myself out of the turbulent and slippery field of eager strife and litigious disputation, to make my accounts with thee, where no outward noise may distract us, nor any way intermeddle between us, excepting only that eternal verity, which by thee shineth upon my faint and gloomy eyes, and in which I see whatever doth or can content thee in me. I have discovered that thou (my soul) wilt survive me: and so survive me as thou will also survive the mortality and changes which belong to me, and which are but accidentary to thee, merely because thou art in me. Then shall the vicissitude of time, and the inequality of dispositions in thee be turned into the constancy of immortality: and into the evenness of one being, never to end, and never to receive a change, or succession to better or worse. When my eye of contemplation hath "been fixed upon this bright sun as long as it is able to endure the radiant beams of it; whose redundant light veileth the looker on with a dark mist; let me turn it for a little space upon the straight passage and narrow gullet through which thou strivest (my soul) with faint and weary steps during thy hazardous voyage upon the earth to make thyself away; and let me examine what comparison there is between thy two conditions, the present one wherein thou...