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338 William Drummond of Hawthornden A Cypress Grove 1623 A CYPRESS GROVE1 Though it hath been doubted if there be in the soul such imperious and superexcellent power as that it can, by the vehement & earnest working of it, deliver knowledge to another without bodily organs, & by the only conceptions and ideas of it produce real effects; yet it hath been ever and of all held as infallible and most certain, that it often (either by outward inspiration or some secret motion in itself) is augur of its own misfortunes and hath shadows of approaching dangers presented unto it before they fall forth. Hence so many strange apparitions and signs, true visions, uncouth heaviness, and causeless uncomfortable languishings—of which to seek a reason, unless from the sparkling of GOD in the soul or from the God-like sparkles of the soul, were to make reason unreasonable by reasoning of things transcending her reach. Having often and diverse times, when I had given myself to rest in the quiet solitariness of the night, found my imagination troubled with a confused fear—no, sorrow, or horror—which, interrupting sleep, did astonish my senses and rouse me all appalled and transported in a sudden agony and amazedness; of such an unaccustomed perturbation, not knowing nor being able to dive into any apparent cause, carried away with the stream of my (then doubting) thoughts, I began to ascribe it to that secret fore-knowledge and presaging power of the prophetic mind, and to interpret such an agony to be to the spirit as a faintness and universal weariness useth to be to the body, a sign of following sickness; or as winter lightnings or earthquakes are to commonwealths and great cities, harbingers of more wretched events. Hereupon not thinking it strange if whatsoever is human should befall me . . . I began to turn over in my remembrance all that could afflict miserable mortality and to 1 {L. E. Kastner’s edition of Cypress grove reveals that the work is a tissue of borrowings from Montaigne , Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse, and, in particular, Innocenzio Ringhieri’s Dialoghi della vita et della morte (1550); the notes that follow indicate only borrowings not found in Kastner.} 339 William Drummond forecast every thing that with a mask of horror could show itself to human eyes, till in the end . . . I was brought to think, and with amazement, on the last of human terrors, or (as one termed it) the last of all dreadful and terrible evils: death. For to easy censure it would appear that the soul, if it foresee that divorcement which it is to have from the body, should not without great reason be thus over-grieved and plunged in inconsolable and unaccustomed sorrow: considering their near union, long familiarity and love, with the great change, pain, ugliness which are apprehended to be the inseparable attendants of death. They had their being together, parts they are of one reasonable creature; the harming of the one is the weakening of the working of the other. What sweet contentments doth the soul enjoy by the senses? They are the gates and windows of its knowledge, the organs of its delight. If it be tedious to an excellent player on the lute to abide but a few months the want of one, how much more must the being without such noble tools and engines be plaintful to the soul? And if two pilgrims which have wandered some few miles together have a hearts-grief when they are near to part, what must the sorrow be at the parting of two so loving friends and never-loathing lovers as are the body and soul? Death is the violent estranger of acquaintance, the eternal divorcer of marriage, the ravisher of the children from the parents, the stealer of parents from their children, the interrer of fame, the sole cause of forgetfulness, by which the living talk of those gone away as of so many shadows or age-worn stories; all strength by it is enfeebled, beauty turned into deformity & rottenness, honor in contempt, glory into baseness. It is the reasonless breaker-off of all actions, by which we enjoy no more the sweet pleasures of earth nor gaze upon the stately revolutions of the heavens; sun perpetually setteth, stars never rise unto us. It in one moment robbeth us of what with so great toil and care in many years we have heaped together. . . . By death we are exiled from...

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