The Anatomy of Melancholy

These fancies are so delightful at first that they could spend whole days and nights without sleep, even whole years alone, in such contemplations and fanciful meditations, which are like dreams. They can scarcely be drawn away from them and will not willingly interrupt them. Their empty imaginings are so pleasant that they obstruct ordinary tasks and necessary business; they cannot set themselves to these, or to almost any study or occupation.

These fanciful, bewitching thoughts attack them so secretly, so keenly, so insistently, so continually; creep in, insinuate themselves, possess, overcome, distract and hold them. They cannot, I say, attend to their more necessary business, ward the thoughts off or free themselves. They are always musing, indulging in melancholy, carried along like someone who, as the story goes, is led round and round a heath at night by a puck.

They hurry on through this labyrinth of anxious, troubled, melancholy meditations, unable or unwilling to hold back or easily stop, winding and unwinding themselves like so many clocks, still indulging their inclinations. At last some distressing object suddenly changes the scene. By now accustomed to these empty meditations and solitary places, they cannot bear company and can brood on nothing but harsh and unpleasant subjects.

Fear, sorrow, suspicion, awkward shyness, discontent, cares and weariness of life take them by surprise in a moment. They can think of nothing else and are continually suspicious. No sooner do they open their eyes than this infernal plague of melancholy seizes them and terrifies their souls, presenting some dismal object to their minds which no means, no effort, no persuasion can now avert. “The deadly arrow clings to their side”: they cannot get rid of it; they cannot resist.

I cannot deny that there is a profitable meditation, contemplation and kind of solitude to be embraced: that which the Fathers—Jerome, Chrysostom, Cyprian and Augustine—praised so highly in whole treatises, and which Petrarch, Erasmus, Stella and others extol in their books. Used rightly, it is a paradise, a heaven on earth, good for the body and better for the soul.

Many monks of old used it for divine contemplation; Simulus, a courtier in Hadrian’s time, and the emperor Diocletian withdrew from the world, and so on. In this sense, “Vatia alone knows how to live”—Vatia lives alone—as the Romans used to say in praise of country life. Or people withdraw to improve their knowledge, as Democritus, Cleanthes and those excellent philosophers have always done, secluding themselves from the tumultuous world; or as at Pliny’s Laurentine villa, Cicero’s Tusculan retreat or Giovio’s study, so that they might better “devote themselves to study and to God,” serve God and pursue their studies.

It seems to me, therefore, that our overzealous reformers were ill advised in that wholesale destruction of abbeys and religious houses, indiscriminately pulling everything down. They might have removed the gross abuses that had crept in and corrected those evils, without raging so furiously against those beautiful buildings, those enduring monuments to our forefathers’ devotion, consecrated to pious uses.