He urges patience as the sole resource.

He alludes not unfrequently to his own death in the same despairing tone.

In the Ode to Torquatus,--one of the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,--he sets before his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows.

He then, in the true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance of to-morrow." "In something of the same strain," said I, "Moschus moralizes on the death of Bion:-- Our trees and plants revive; the rose In annual youth of beauty glows; But when the pride of Nature dies, Man, who alone is great and wise, No more he rises into light, The wakeless sleeper of eternal night.'" "It reminds me," said Elder Staples, "of the sad burden of Ecclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while the preacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of the things of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality to relieve the dark picture.

Like Horace, he sees nothing better than to eat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart.