mortality (n.)
- changeableness
- clay
- corruptibility
- deadliness
- death
- ephemerality
- ephemeralness
- evanescence
- fatality
- finitude
- fleetingness
- flesh
- frailty
- fugacity
- hominid
- homo
- humanity
- humankind
- humanness
- impermanence
- impermanency
- instability
- lethality
- malignance
- malignancy
- malignity
- man
- mankind
- mutability
- perishability
- perniciousness
- transience
- transiency
- transitoriness
- virulence
- volatility
- weakness
Child of mortality, whence comest thou? Why is thy countenance sad, and why are thine eyes red with weeping?
How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap!
How fading are the joys we dote upon!
Like apparitions seen and gone.
But those which soonest take their flight
Are the most exquisite and strong,—
Like angels' visits, short and bright;
Mortality's too weak to bear them long.
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.
