Very soon, you will be either ashes or bones. Maybe a name. Maybe not even that. And what is a name but empty sound and echo? The things we care most about in life are worthless when you really look at them — rotting and contemptible. The most serious matters, if you see them clearly, are like puppies biting each other. Or like children laughing one moment and crying the next. As for faith and honesty and justice and truth — as the poet said, they left this wide earth long ago and went back to heaven.
Within a very little while, thou wilt be either ashes, or a sceletum; and a name perchance; and perchance, not so much as a name. And what is that but an empty sound, and a rebounding echo? Those things which in this life are dearest unto us, and of most account, they are in themselves but vain, putrid, contemptible. The most weighty and serious, if rightly esteemed, but as puppies, biting one another: or untoward children, now laughing and then crying. As for faith, and modesty, and justice, and truth, they long since, as one of the poets hath it, have abandoned this spacious earth, and retired themselves unto heaven.