The Traveller

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MEDITATION IL ON TAKING FAREWELL. 1757. Every thing beneath the sun, has vanity and vexation engraven on it; and it is fit it should be so, lest men, possessing what they aspire after, should forget themselves. So we see, we feel, that pleasure is interwoven with pain, sweet with sour, joy with sorrow, riches with anxiety and cares, greatness with torment, health with disease, and life with death. When I took farewell of my friends to see other nations, and rise into a more universal knowledge of the world and men, trifles that please an aspiring mind), yet how were all my fine prospects more than balanced, to think that I might never see my native land again, the land of liberty and light, the Hephzibah of God! What if I should drop into the unfathomed deeps of the ocean, and be a prey to the finny tribe ? But, abstracting from these gloomy forethoughts, how was joy turned into a flow of friendly sorrow ! Can I yet forget the affectionate grasp of hand, the melting tear, the parting kiss, and kindly look, as if it might have been the last, and all from friends so near and dear ? Yet this must be; I must either forbear going abroad, or take farewell of all my friends; and who knows if ever I shall see them again, till in another world, where the nearest ties are loosed, and the dearest relation dissolved, unless a spiritual relation unite our souls to him of whom the whole family in The Author never saw some friends, alludi'd to above, xgain in life, particularly his mother. heaven and earth is named, a family that shall never scatter or be dispersed through the ages of eternity! The highest wisdom of the traveller, then, is to get himself made a member of the heavenly family. Thus, when the frail family, of which he is a mortal member, must be divided, parte...