It is manifest, indeed, to be a token of however slight a prosperity, that we are visited by the color of a temporary peace, with the address of friends shining through for a while. Nevertheless that surge of the deluge, which you have compared to the storms of the times, presses hard upon human affairs with the wave of unceasing disturbance, while the course is run through the worldly sea. Since this very thing, that we breathe again amid the adversities of the times, we ought rather to reckon the intervals of the perils we suffer than their end. For only for this reason does a certain light seem to play amid the misfortunes of calamities—circumscribing rather than healing them—that the succeeding anguish, with fear renewed more grievously, may afflict minds relaxed by a deceitful security.
Wherefore cease, most excellent man, to believe that the boiling of evils is the end of evils: and when, by a movement unlike the tempest it has stirred, the face of so brief a serenity shows itself in turn, be not delighted by the variety of outcomes, but use it. Nor let prosperity so lift you up, nor adversity so break you, that in your mind the cause of friends should be changed as much as that of the times. Be ever mindful of the charity we have set before us, if it be permitted to write: but if otherwise—which cannot be forbidden—at least love: and after the whirlpools which you have described in your letters, hope the more, in that world, for the harbor where a settled tranquillity shall not be able to fear shipwreck.