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I felt then as we invariably feel on such occasions, when some special motive has called us forth in time to witness this heavenly change, as of a new creation The miracle of diuturnity Whose instancy unbeds the lark, that all the days of my life on which I had not witnessed it were wasted days! O that unbedding of the lark!
No speculative acquaintance with propositions satisfies it, no egotistic construction of systems, but the truth expressed in life, the truth as that which alone either has or can give being and diuturnity, this is its food, for which it thirsts with holy ardor.
And since death must be the Lucina of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die; since our longest sun sets at right declensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes ; since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos, and time, that grows old itself, bids us hope no long duration, diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.
The highest development of which such love is capable arises through the contemplation of those verities which are abstract and eternal, and which thus set forth, to the extent the individual mind is capable of receiving it, the completed notion of diuturnity.
That, in spite of Bruni's envy, in spite of injurious time, in spite of the still worse insult of the modernised cathedral and the desecrated monument, embalms him in our memory and secures for him the diuturnity for which he paid his twenty thousand crowns. Money, methinks, beholding him, was rarely better expended on a similar ambition.
Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementoes, and time that grows old in itself bids us hope no long duration; diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.... There is nothing strictly immortal but immortality. Whatever hath no beginning may be confident of no end.
Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and composed a scorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on the suggested theme of "diuturnity in monuments," and false ambition. Our old friends of humanistic learning Cyrus, Alexander, Cæsar meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab."
Some study diuturnity upon two meals a day, or pursue old age by means of "unfired food," Others devour roots by moonlight, or savagely dine upon a pocket of raw beans. These are intemperate on water, or bewail the touch of salt as sacrilege against the sacrifice of eggs. These grovel for nuts like the Hampshire hog, or impiously celebrate the fruitage by which man fell.
In part at least: the phrase is pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for "diuturnity in monuments," who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by humanistic jealousy, expressing its malevolence with humanistic crudity of satire, was destined after all to be defrauded of his well-paid tomb. The monument, a master work of Donatello and his collaborator, was duly erected.
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