Hydriotaphia: Urn-Burial

Sir Thomas Browne is a fascinating figure in the history of English letters. Perhaps his best known work is Hydriotaphia, Latin for urn burial, an essay about some urns containing burnt bones that were dug up at Old Walsingham, Norfolk, in 1657. While Browne supposed that the urns were Roman ("no obscure conjecture"), their origin was instead Saxon. Nevertheless, the text is noteworthy not for its scientific account of the bone fragments but for how Browne is able to use this discovery as a departure point for a highly poetic meditation on mortality.

Some excerpts:

It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine.

We live with death, and die not in a moment.

If the nearnesse of our last necessity, brought a nearer conformity unto it, there were a happinesse in hoary hairs, and no calamity in half senses. But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors.

Particularly eye-catching are his pronouncements concerning human vanity and the pretensions of being remembered after our death:

Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their Reliques, they had not so grosly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but Pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes, which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves, a fruitlesse continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as Emblemes of mortall vanities; Antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices. Pagan vain-glories which thought the world might last for ever, had encouragement for ambition, and finding no Atropos unto the immortality of their Names, were never dampt with the necessity of oblivion.

But the iniquity of oblivion blindely scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the Temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it; Time hath spared the Epitaph of Adrians horse, confounded that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by the advantage of our good names, since bad have equall durations; and Thersites is like to live as long as Agamenon: Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, then any that stand remembred in the known account of time?

Oblivion is not to be hired: The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the Register of God, not in the record of man.

Since our longest Sunne sets at right descensions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darknesse, and have our light in ashes. Since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying memento's, and time that grows old it self, bids us hope no long duration: Diuturnity is a dream and folly of expectation.

His discourse resembles Ecclesiastes in his denouncement of vanity and his exhortation to find solace in the "Register of God." But the religious message is almost beside the point. His glorious yet gloomy words emanate from the pages and stick in the mind.

Browne is also remembered for making two statements that would prove incredibly prophetic. First, there is the fact that he died on his birthday. Brown wrote about such a coincidence. In his Letter to a Friend, he writes:

Nothing is more common with Infants than to die on the day of their Nativity, to behold the worldly Hours, and but the Fractions thereof; and even to perish before their Nativity in the hidden World of the Womb, and before their good Angel is conceived to undertake them. But in Persons who out-live many Years and when there are no less than three hundred sixty five days to determine their Lives in every Year; that the first day should make the last, that the Tail of the Snake should return into its Mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind up upon the Day of their Nativity is indeed a remarkable Coincidence; which, tho' Astrology hath taken witty Pains to salve, yet hath it been very wary in making Predictions of it.

The second statement, which so fascinated W.G. Sebald that he undertook a quest to discover the ultimate fate of these circumstances, can be found in the very epistle that serves as an introduction to Hydriotaphia.

Browne's remains were fated not to rest in peace. In 1840, during preparations for another burial in the chancel, his coffin was damaged and its contents partially exposed. Sebald writes in The Rings of Saturn:

As a result, Browne's skull and a lock of his hair passed into the possession of one Dr. Lubbock, a parish councillor, who in turn left the relics in his will to the hospital museum, where they were put on display amidst various anatomical curiosities until 1921 under a bell jar. It was not until then that St. Peter Mancroft's repeated request for the return of Browne's skull was acceded to, and, almost a quarter of a millennium after the first burial, a second interment was performed with all due ceremony. Curiously enough, Browne himself ... offers the most fitting commentary on the subsequent odyssey of his own skull when he writes that to be gnaw'd out of our graves is a tragical abomination. But, he adds, who is to know the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?