The academie of eloquence containing a compleat English rhetorique, exemplified with common-places and formes digested into an easie and methodical way to speak and write fluently according to the mode of the present times : together with letters both amorous and moral upon emergent occasions / by Tho. Blount, Gent.

Death.

DEath is that inconsiderable atome of time that divides the body from the soul, &c.

Scaliger defines Death to be the Cessation of the souls functions.

When Hadrian asked Secundus what Death was, he answered in these severall truths; It is a sleep eternall, the bodies dissolution, the rich mans fear, the poor mans wish, an event inevitable, an uncer∣tain journey, a thief that steals away man, sleeps father, lifes flight, the departure of the living, and the resolution of all. Feltham.

Death had no sooner absented him from her eyes but forgetfulness drew him out of her heart.

When we once come in sight of the port of Death, to which all winds drive us; and when by letting fall that fatall Anchor, which can never be weighed again, the Navigation of this life takes end: Then it is, I say, that our own cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations formerly beaten from us by our health and felicity) return again and pay us to the uttermost for all the pleasing pas∣sages of our lives past. Sir Wa. Rawl.

Death deprived me of my paradized bliss, and not onely made my broken heart the sad habita∣tion of woe, but also turned my mind (which before was a kingdom to me) into a hell of tor∣menting thoughts.

Torches made of Aromatique wood, cast out their odoriferous exhalations when they are al∣most wasted: So the vertuous A. made all the good odors of her life evaporate in the last instant of her death

Tha•• he is dead, — As if she now scorn'd

life, Death lends her cheeks his paleness, and her eyes tell down their drops of silver to the earth, wishing her tears might rain upon his grave, to make the gentle earth produce some flower should bear his name and memory.

— She (prostrated on the body of her Lover) sought in his eclipsed eyes and dead lips, the rem∣nant of her life.

I shall not be unwilling to suffer a goal-delivery of my soul from the prison of my body, when I am called to it.

—Delivered up to the immortality of another world. This deadly sha••t passing through him, so wounded me, that I my self was arrived within few paces of the land of darkness. In his silent marble, the best part of that small portion of joy I had in the world▪ but all my hopes are entom∣bed. Wats in Baa. Preface.

(Drawing neere to the confines of Deaths king∣dom▪)

Death ••rees a man from misery, and wafts him to the haven of his happiness. Her.

As soon as Death hath played the Midwife to our second birth, our soul shall then see all truths more freely▪ then our corporall eys at our first birth see all bodies and colours. Sir K.D.