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'Until very lately solution of continuity was a favourite phrase with English surgeons; where a bone was broken, or the flesh, &c. cut or lacerated, there was a solution of continuity. See ante, ii. 106, for laceration. He died March 11, 1780, aged 40. Gent. Mag. 1780, p. 155. 'Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Quæ nunc abibis in loca, Pallidula, rigida, nudula?
Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Benjamin Wright began: "'Animula vagula blandula, Hospes comesque corporis, Qua nunc abibis in loca? "What do you think, Lavendar?" "It will return to God, who gave it," said Dr. Lavendar. There was another silence; until he wakened to say, brightly, "Simmons, you freckled nigger, you'd better wring their necks, now, I guess."
The caressing tone in which the Emperor Hadrian addresses his soul is very much like that of an old person talking with a grandchild or some other pet: "Animula, vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis." "Dear little, flitting, pleasing sprite, The body's comrade and its guest." How like the language of Catullus to Lesbia's sparrow!
The end was drawing on: the golden bowl was breaking; the silver cord was fast being loosed; that animula blandula, vagula, hospes, comesque, was about to flee. The body and the soul companions for sixty years were being sundered, and taking leave.
"Animula vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis," graduates into the higher sensitiveness of the lower class of animals. Nor need we hesitate to recognize the fine gradations from simple sensitiveness and volition to the higher instinctive and to the other psychical manifestations of the higher brute animals. The gradation is undoubted, however we may explain it.
Animula, blandula vagula that's the sort of ring for it, but Latin's mostly too heavy. Io, Hymen, Hymenae, Io; Io, Hymen, Hymenae! What's that? A wedding song of Catullus absit omen. I must be in love with her indeed. He got up from the piano, and paced quickly and feverishly up and down the room. 'And yet, he went on, 'if only I weren't bound down so by this unprofitable trade of parson!
It was very hard not to spring to her assistance; but such gallantry would have been excessively ill-timed, so I was forced to sit still while the poor animula, vagula, blandula, worked herself free and arose unfettered by my side. Perhaps this is as fitting a place as any to mention the test whereby I have tried the Spirits who have come to me.
Come, my friend, how much is it? I ask the easiest interest in the world: old Mordecai, the usurer, has made you pay twice as heavily before now: nothing but the signature of a bond, which is a mere ceremony, and the transfer of an article which, in itself, is a supposition a valueless, windy, uncertain property of yours, called by some poet of your own, I think, an animula, vagula, blandula bah! there is no use beating about the bush I mean a soul.
The end was drawing on; the golden bowl was breaking; the silver cord was fast being loosed that animula, blandula, vagula, hospes, comesque, was about to flee. The body and the soul companions for sixty years were being sundered and taking leave.
Hadrian's famous "animula vagula blandula" gives the same idea, and it would be difficult to imagine a disembodied spirit which retains its personality and returns to earth again except as a kind of immaterial likeness of its earthly self. We often hear of the extreme pallor of ghosts, which was doubtless due to their being bloodless and to the pallor of death itself.
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