Page:The battle of the books - Guthkelch - 1908.djvu/178

 either name a most intimate grief. You have lost at once a niece, the daughter of your mother's son, and a good wife, of pre-eminent beauty, and of such chastity as left no room for any other woman even to follow her. Naturally you are stunned, and have quite lost heart, and you give yourself up to lamentation without regard even for your health. But you must not overtax the endurance of the soul in your heavy grief. It is not the part of virtue to abandon yourself to sorrow and to treat your trouble as incurable. Nay, Nicocles, turn your thoughts a little from your own suffering and consider how man's wretched life is ordered. Each of us is born to countless ills; when a man has won through them, his troublesome sojourn is over and he is at rest; yet we deem such a life as this pleasant, inasmuch as we look forward to death as the worst ill that can come upon us. We pity the dead that goes first, though we follow him at no great distance and know not that our tears are shed for ourselves. This is the way of men, Nicocles; for this end are we all reared; there is no living man whom it does not await, there is no power more uncontrolled; it is the lot of every man, and