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The present writer, at any rate, can bear witness to the splendid echo of Browne's syllables amid learned and ancient walls; for he has known, he believes, few happier moments than those in which he has rolled the periods of the Hydriotaphia out to the darkness and the nightingales through the studious cloisters of Trinity.
We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out. Nothing could be better adapted to the meaning and sentiment of this passage than the limpid, even flow of its rhythm. But who could conceive of such a rhythm being ever applicable to the meaning and sentiment of these sentences from the Hydriotaphia?
Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by F.D. Myers. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald. London: Macmillan & Co., 1868. Robert Herrick's Hesperides. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1885. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia. Edited by Willis Bund. Sampson Low & Co., 1873. Thomas Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad Times.
He ultimately settled and practised at Norwich. Other books are Pseudodoxia Epidemica: Enquiries into Vulgar Errors , Hydriotaphia, or Urn-burial ; and The Garden of Cyrus in the same year. After his death were pub. his Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals. B. is one of the most original writers in the English language.
He was a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imagination, whose thoughts have impressed themselves upon many kindred minds, like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his books belong to literature, Religio Medici, published in 1642, and Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, suggested by some Roman funeral urns dug up in Norfolk.
The title, at least, of the Urn-Burial is more familiar to the most of us than that of the Pseudodoxia. It was the chance discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk that furnished Sir Thomas with the occasion to write his Hydriotaphia.
Browne, he says, 'had come to the conclusion that classic words were the only legitimate ones, the only ones which interpreted with elegance the thoughts of a sensitive and cultivated man, and that the rest were barbarous. We are to suppose, then, that if he had happened to hold the opinion that Saxon words were the only legitimate ones, the Hydriotaphia would have been as free from words of classical derivation as the sermons of Latimer.
Gosse cannot help protesting somewhat acrimoniously against that very method of writing whose effects he is so ready to admire. In practice, he approves; in theory, he condemns. He ranks the Hydriotaphia among the gems of English literature; and the prose style of which it is the consummate expression he denounces as fundamentally wrong.
All about the room lay books that were not of my culling, from the oak cases, whose every door stood ajar, novels innumerable, "The Arabian Nights," Vaughan's "Silex Scintillans," with a scarlet leaf laid in against "Peace," and "Tennyson" turned on its face at "Fatima," a heavy volume of French moral philosophy, a Methodist hymn-book, Sir Thomas Browne's "Hydriotaphia," and a gilded red-bound history of "Five Little Pigs."
Wood, and Life of sir Thomas Browne. the end of Hydriotaphia. Johnson, by trusting; to his memory, has here fallen into an error.
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