"Manuet," says he, "opera interrupta, minaeque
Murorum ingentes."

["The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls
unmade."--AEneid, iv. 88.]

A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the
finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought
to perfection. We are born to action:

"Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus."

["When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed."
--Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.]

I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to
extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me
planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens
not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of
nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a
chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the
fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:

"Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum
jam desiderium rerum super insidet una."

["They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess
things."--Lucretius, iii. 913.]

We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours.