Prota Matija Nenadovic On Death

"As an oak-tree of many years, which lightnings and tempests have not brought to the ground, begins of itself to wither and to lose branch after branch, and declines even nearer to its end, so, my dear children, I also, whom the guns and the sabres of the enemy have happily passed by, and whom mortal illnesses have spared, now feel that my body, according to the eternal laws of nature, grows daily weaker and approaches even closer to the grave."

Quote from "The Memoirs of Prota Matija Nenadovic", edited and translated from the Serbian by Lovett F. Edwards. Oxford At The Clarendon press, 1969.